The White House released two reports to inform U.S. leadership about a national strategy in wireless communications through 5G technology. 

The Office of Science and Technology Policy said Thursday that the research-and-development priorities report conducted with the wireless spectrum R&D interagency working group identifies three spectrum priority areas: advance spectrum agility and flexibility to use new waveforms and multiple bands; build up near real-time spectrum awareness; and boost spectrum effectiveness and efficiency through secure autonomous spectrum decision-making.

The second report titled “Emerging Technologies and their Expected Impact on Non-Federal Spectrum Demand” looks at 5G and Wi-Fi technologies and how they will use spectrum in the future.

“These reports lay a strong foundation for the National Spectrum Strategy and serve as a resource for decision makers formulating spectrum policy. The upcoming strategy will focus on a balanced approach to spectrum management to support critical government services and future demands for spectrum,” OSTP noted.

OSTP said the reports were issued in accordance with a presidential memorandum released in October 2018 that orders the development of a national spectrum policy. The White House and the Federal Communications Commission announced initiatives in April to accelerate 5G deployment, including plans to conduct a spectrum auction in December.

The Office of Inspector General provided 10 recommendations to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to help reinforce its network firewalls. OIG said in an audit that it discovered vulnerabilities at the FDIC network firewalls that may have mitigated their capacity to track and repel cyberattacks. 

The findings stated that the firewalls did not meet system configuration requirements, lacked rules and documentation and did not utilize administrators for authentication functions. The recommendations included the implementation of an evaluation process, a review of all network firewalls and the establishment of a compliant firewall policy.

The report noted that the FDIC recorded 985 cybersecurity cases from 2014 to 2017 with 12 cases marked as major incidents.

The Census Bureau aims to develop an artificial intelligence-based tool to streamline and speed up the process to grant authority to operate for new systems and applications, Nextgov reported Wednesday. The effort is being led by the Census FISMAtic team. Officials said the AI bot would work like the Clippy automated assistant that supported Microsoft Office products from 1997 to 2007.

Alex Cohen, program manager for Census’ Center for Applied Technology, said the tool would read all existing ATOs, find commonalities between approved applications and apply language processing to establish a response to future applications. 

“The goal is to take all the ATOs the Census Bureau has done… and write some natural language processing tools that look through those looking for commonalities in the way responses are written,” he said. 

Cohen noted his team is developing what the tool will look like and how the machine learning and AI would work. They plan to collect sample ATOs from Census Bureau to train the AI bot to read applications and provide responses. 

The Senate Armed Services Committee wants to see the U.S. Army in charge of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, a platform designed to deter ballistic missiles, Defense News reported Wednesday. The committee released an executive summary of the fiscal 2020 defense authorization bill to mandate the Missile Defense Agency to turn THAAD’s responsibility over to the Army.

The transfer would include procurement and sustainment funds allotted for the THAAD system. The Army’s layered missile defense includes THAAD that neutralizes enemy ballistic missiles during a flight’s terminal phase, the report noted. Soldiers use the system to launch interceptors against ballistic missile threats.

For years, the branch has been the system’s user, while MDA oversees development. Leadership from both sides would not reject the turnover if funds are available without compromising other defense projects, the report noted.