GovConJudicata Weekly Debrief (8/30–9/3)

This week's Weekly Debrief covers a potential cybersecurity safe harbor bill, GAO's upcoming report on pandemic cyber, an IT contractor's 14-month prison sentence for bribery, HPE's GreenLake deal with NSA, NASA's future work plan, and Blue Origin's link to JEDI.

Cyber

NextGov – Lawmaker to Propose Bill to Incentivize Industry Cybersecurity Cooperation Within Days

• "Rep. John Katko, R-N.Y., plans to soon introduce legislation based on the idea that private companies will implement appropriate cybersecurity measures in exchange for a safe harbor from liability if attackers breach their systems"

FedNewsNet GAO will release report on pandemic cyber, expand reviews to include supply chain in near future

• "The Government Accountability Office is planning to release a report in early fiscal 2022 about the cybersecurity impacts of technologies adopted in response to the pandemic. When government agencies shifted to mass telework, that presented a whole host of new challenges for IT personnel who weren’t used to having the majority of their endpoints outside traditional network boundaries, and catalyzed the current push to adopt zero trust."

Tech

FedScoop – IT contractor gets 14-month prison sentence for bribing federal officials

• "The owner of an IT services business has received a 14-month jail sentence for paying bribes to federal and state officials in exchange for favorable treatment on contracts."

CompWeekly – HPE signs 10-year GreenLake HPC deal worth $2bn with US National Security Agency

• "The US National Security Agency (NSA) has signed a 10-year, $2bn, managed high-performance computing (HPC) deal with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). The HPC capabilities will be delivered to the NSA in an “as-a-service” manner through HPE GreenLake, an offering designed to provide enterprises with access to managed public cloud-like IT resources housed in their own on-premise datacentres."

NASA

FedNewsNet – NASA’s future of work plan starts with the ‘experimental phase’

• "Like most scientific studies, the best ones start with a trial period, an experimental phase, where patterns emerge and data and feedback is collected. That’s how NASA is approaching its next great experiment, determining the future of work at the agency."

Industry

ARSTechnica – Blue Origin hires advisory firm linked to messy JEDI contract process

• "After losing out on a multibillion dollar NASA contract for a lunar lander to SpaceX in April, Blue Origin has hired a high-profile strategic advisory firm named Pallas Advisors. These high-profile advisors have helped the company as it has gone on to protest the contract loss and eventually sue the space agency."

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