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This week, millions of voters will confront not only the decision of who to vote for, but also the more mundane questions of where and when to vote, whether they need to bring identification, and who or what exactly will be on the ballot.

Despite the march of technology that makes that information available online to more and more people, finding the correct information for a given voting district has been a continuing challenge for veteran and prospective voters alike, as well as state and local election officials. Keep reading →

Police and other emergency management officials in four cities around the country got a glimpse of what the Nationwide Public Safety Broadband Network (NPSBN) might look like once the infrastructure begins to take root.

Five months after Congress passed a law that granted public safety organizations the much-needed mobile broadband spectrum (the so-called D Block in the 700 MHz band), Melbourne, Fla.-based Harris Corp. conducted the first live test of a real-time first responder network. The test, conducted July 12, spanned four states and leveraged 700MHz band LTE (Long Term Evolution) technologies. Keep reading →

Verizon’s plans to eliminate unlimited use plans should accelerate the federal government’s push to leverage Uncle Sam’s buying power to get lower prices and enhanced services from the carriers and the device manufacturers, a federal IT marketplace expert said Friday.

According to a CNET report, Verizon Wireless officials on Thursday clarified plans to discontinue unlimited data plans, saying customers could keep their existing unlimited data plans if they keep their existing device or buy a new device at the full retail cost of the smartphone. In other words, the report states, if a customer renews a contract and purchases a subsidized phone, they would lose the option to keep the unlimited plan. Keep reading →

A new, first-of-its-kind, national alert system in the U.S. that allows the public to receive major emergency alert notifications on their mobile phones without having to sign up or pay for them went live this past weekend, according to a report from Government Technology.

The new Commercial Mobile Alert System (CMAS) was developed through a partnership between the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Federal Communications Commission and wireless phone carriers in what is seen as an important step forward to increase public safety nationwide, according to FEMA officials. Keep reading →


In the 1980s, Edward Amoroso was a member of the security design team for then-President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, the program that sought to build a space-based shield to protect Americans from a nuclear ballistic missile attack.

Now, as chief security officer at AT&T, Amoroso oversees a strategic defense initiative of a different nature – securing billions of bytes of information as they travel over the airwaves and wires. Keep reading →

Federal agencies trying to plot their path toward a mobile future need to be willing to say “yes” to pilot programs even if the outcomes are hard to predict, said Veterans Affairs CIO Roger Baker today in a panel discussion at the Executive Leadership Conference.

But even if agencies move forward to embrace mobile technologies, they must also resolve,” How do we work around interagency silos to share these services,” said Gwynne Kostin, director mobile, GSA Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies. Keep reading →

The Environmental Protection Agency is taking the Obama administration’s “cloud first” policy on information technology to heart. All of the agency’s applications, systems and services are under consideration for migration to a cloud-computing environment.

“Everything is on the table for discussion,” said Malcolm Jackson, EPA assistant administrator for the Office of Environmental Information and chief information officer. “I ask the question, ‘Why not cloud?’ Everything is an option. We don’t have any sacred cows.” Keep reading →