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How a Pentagon contract sparked a cloud war

Next month, the Defense Department is expected to bid out a lucrative contract that will task a single cloud provider with building the cloud the U.S. military will use for war.

The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract—perhaps worth as much as $10 billion over 10 years—will put a commercial company in charge of hosting and distributing mission-critical workloads and classified military secrets to warfighters around the globe.

Many experts believe Amazon Web Services is considered the odds-on favorite to win JEDI because it already hosts classified data, yet public jockeying for the department’s business spotlights a larger battle among industry for dominion over a growing federal cloud market.

The Defense Department awarded about $2.3 billion in cloud computing contracts in fiscal 2017, according to an estimate from Deltek, a research firm that crunches government spending data. Deltek predicts Defense spending on cloud could grow 20 percent year over year through 2022 and a total potential cloud market across the federal government of more than $6 billion. Those estimates came before the department released JEDI and another cloud contract with an $8 billion ceiling.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2018/04/how-pentagon-contract-sparked-cloud-war/147788/

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Former NSA contractor admits to stealing confidential documents

A former National Security Agency contractor at the center of one of several pending leak cases has pleaded guilty to one of 20 counts he faces for removing classified information from the agency and storing those documents in his home for decades.

Harold Martin III, 52, was arrested in August 2016 and later indicted on 20 counts of willful retention of national defense information. According to the indictment, over the course of 23 years working as a contractor for the intelligence community, Martin took documents from the agencies he was working for and kept them in his Maryland home, some of which included top secret and sensitive compartmented information.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2018/01/former-nsa-contractor-admits-stealing-confidential-documents/144956/

Background on this story can be found in this 2016 New York Times article: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/20/us/harold-martin-nsa.html

 

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Massive classified NSA contract under protest

One of the National Security Agency’s most important technology contracts — secretly awarded to AT&T weeks ago — is under protest by one of the losing bidders, DXC Technology.

The contract in question is part of the NSA’s classified Groundbreaker program, which dates back to a 2001 effort to outsource its IT operations originally valued at more than $5 billion but grew so large NSA recently opted to break the new contract into three separate pieces.

NSA awarded the first contract of the new Groundbreaker recompete to tech firm CSRA in September for $2.4 billion. Because of the protest, the Government Accountability Office will review NSA’s award of the second Groundbreaker contract to AT&T, which sources tell Nextgov is valued at less than $2 billion.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.nextgov.com/cloud-computing/2017/10/massive-classified-nsa-contract-under-protest/142078

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Judge denies bail for accused NSA leaker, citing security risk

A woman charged with leaking U.S. secrets must remain jailed until her trial, a federal judge ruled last Thursday, saying her release would pose an “ongoing risk to national security.”

Reality Winner, 25, is a former Air Force linguist who worked as a contractor for the National Security Agency at a facility in Augusta, Georgia, when she was charged in June with copying a classified U.S. report and mailing it to a news organization.

Winner’s defense attorneys asked a judge to reconsider releasing her on bail after her trial date was postponed from October to next March. They argued Winner had no prior criminal history and served admirably in the military. Winner’s mother in Kingsville, Texas, planned to move to Georgia to ensure her daughter obeyed any terms of her bond.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.fifthdomain.com/civilian/fbi-doj/2017/10/05/judge-denies-bail-for-accused-nsa-leaker-citing-security-risk/

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DARPA needs vendors cleared for classified research

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) works on technologies and ideas at the bleeding edge of research, most of which have at least some tangential military use.  

DARPA“Often, these projects are classified and can only be solicited from a limited number of sources,” according to a July 11 request for information issued by the agency.

“DARPA must maintain up-to-date knowledge about potential performers to maximize the number of sources that can be solicited for classified, highly specialized, [cyberspace operations] R&D initiatives.”

Keep reading this article at: http://www.federaltimes.com/story/government/cybersecurity/2016/07/11/darpa-vendor-clearance/86947934/

 

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