Government

The U.S. government will be a prime target for mobile information technology vendors offering a variety of devices, associated telecom services, and mobile management assistance over the next several years. By 2017, annual federal spending on a wide range of mobile IT capabilities could approach $10...

Federal agencies have been diligently pursuing the use of cloud-based information technology for the past three years in compliance with a White House directive. As a result, federal spending on cloud-based technologies reached $2.3 billion in fiscal 2013, according to a market assessment by Deltek....

It is hard to figure out which is growing at a faster pace -- movement to the cloud or cybercrime. Cybercrime is following the data to the cloud, according to reports, to find and steal cloud data of hotel records, credit card information, and maybe even corporate secrets and the client files of law...

The consumer privacy backlash stirred up by Facebook's recent deal to purchase WhatsApp for $19 billion is now in full swing. The Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy jointly filed a complaint about the deal with the FTC. Following the announcement of the agreem...

What is going on with Sprint Softbank? What will the company look like when it finally emerges from its cocoon? Who else will it merge with? Where will it be based? There has been quite a bit of transformational work going on. Sprint and Softbank won U.S. government approval after months of vigorous...

U.S. government agencies are moving briskly into the mobile era, spurred by the fast pace of technological change. The scope of the federal mobile market is broad-based, and to some degree depends upon what is meant by such terms as "wireless," "mobility" and "digital." The parameters of that market...

A British intelligence agency indiscriminately collected photos from the webcams of Yahoo users and stored them on its servers over a period of several years as part of a surveillance program called "Optic Nerve." The operation was run by the UK's NSA counterpart, GCHQ, according to a top secret doc...

The U.S. Department of Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence reportedly have submitted four proposals to reform the National Security Agency's phone surveillance program. The recommendations come well before the March 28 deadline set by President Obama. Three deal with havi...

The explosion of the Internet of Things, or IoT, promises great opportunities for improving quality of life -- but also for creating both seen and unforeseen dangers. The IoT generally refers to a network of physical objects that contain embedded technology to sense, communicate and interact with th...

U.S. government agencies have faced significant obstacles in meeting a federal mandate designed to foster the use of cloud technologies, but those challenges are unlikely to derail federal adoption of the technology, and there are indications that cloud deployments will accelerate at a much faster r...

A group of 18 organizations on Thursday announced the formation of WifiForward, a coalition that aims to persuade policymakers to open more unlicensed wireless spectrum for use by WiFi-enabled devices. Members include the American Library Association, Best Buy, Comcast, the Consumer Electronics Asso...

Federal agencies spend considerable portions of their budgets on their legal offices. For example, the U.S. Department of Justice awarded a $1.1 billion multiyear contract in 2013 for a wide range of information technologies and legal support services. Yet legal staffs across the federal government ...

The European Commission has accepted Google's latest proposal to settle a probe of its practices pending agreement with the 125 companies and organizations that filed complaints against the Internet giant. Google last week made its third settlement offer, following a warning from the Commission on J...

Federal employees quickly have become strong adherents of mobile devices. In a recent survey, 90 percent of government employees said they used at least one mobile device -- laptop, smartphone or tablet -- for work purposes. However, the enthusiasm by federal workers for the use of mobile devices ha...

Democratic members of Congress this week moved to replace by legislative means the Net neutrality rules that a court decision last month suddenly rendered defunct. Lawmakers introduced the Open Internet Preservation Act in both chambers. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals last month changed the telec...