Government · Data & AI
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11 articles · Government · Data & AI
Articles
Week of 11 August 2025
Secrets in a public docket: the court filing breach and where the sensitive tier ends
The federal courts already had a separate path for their most sensitive documents when their filing system was breached in 2025. The trouble was where its boundary sat. Agencies holding dangerous records in general systems need a tier defined by consequence, not label.
Week of 31 March 2025
Lighter rules, heavier contracts: OMB’s April 2025 AI memos handed governance to the buyer
OMB’s April 2025 memos lightened internal AI process but asked contracts to carry more of the weight. Agencies that treated every stage of a contract as a governance tool kept bargaining power that review boards alone could not give them.
Week of 20 January 2025
Revoking the AI executive order could not revoke the AI inventory, because Congress had written it
On inauguration day the 2023 AI executive order was revoked, and replacement guidance was weeks away. Agency AI programs could sort their work by what held it up: the order alone, OMB memos awaiting revision, or laws Congress had passed that still applied.
Week of 20 May 2024
How Windows Recall put a possible public record where no records officer could reach it
Microsoft answered Recall’s security critics by keeping screen snapshots on the laptop, locked to the user and set to expire. Those same three choices put the snapshots beyond the search, hold and retention tools agencies rely on for public records and lawsuits.
Week of 25 March 2024
Easy to grant, hard to defend: M-24-10 put every federal AI exception on the record
OMB’s final AI memo kept the hard deadline: make risky AI safe or switch it off. It also made every way out, whether a determination, a waiver or an extension, carry a named signer, written evidence and a record others would read.
Week of 30 October 2023
How OMB’s first AI memo reached AI systems agencies already ran
Days after the October 2023 AI executive order, OMB’s draft guidance told agencies that AI affecting people’s rights or safety must meet minimum practices by a deadline or be switched off. The hardest cases were systems already running, many hidden inside vendor products.
Week of 2 May 2022
Quantum risk is dated by how long your data must stay secret
NSM-10 set 2035 as a national goal. For any single agency system, though, the real deadline comes sooner: how long its data must stay secret, plus how long fixing it will take, measured against when a code-breaking machine might exist.
Week of 31 May 2021
After Van Buren, insider snooping is an access design problem
In June 2021 the Supreme Court decided that looking up records you are allowed to reach, for a bad reason, is generally not a federal computer crime. For agencies holding sensitive records, protection now rests on controls they own: access design, query monitoring and consequences.
Week of 9 November 2020
Who may see the vaccination record: the negotiation behind the rollout
The first strong COVID-19 vaccine result turned a scientific question into a logistics one. For public agencies the hardest constraint was data: matching people without a national ID, agreeing who could see records, and connecting hundreds of new sources in weeks.
Week of 8 June 2020
When vendors set facial recognition policy before agencies did
Within days in June 2020, IBM, Amazon and Microsoft stepped back from selling facial recognition to police. Agencies discovered their suppliers were setting AI policy for them, because few had their own inventory, use rules or contract terms.
Week of 13 April 2020
Why exposure notification apps rose or fell on the back office
Apple and Google settled the privacy design of exposure notification for health agencies. Whether an app helped came down to what agencies controlled: how fast positive tests produced codes, what alerts told people to do, and getting residents to switch it on.