Issues with Access to Acquisition Data and Information in the Department of Defense

📖 The Scoop

Acquisition data play a critical role in the management of the U.S. Department of Defense's (DoD's) portfolio of weapon systems. Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) labels are one of the key methods for protecting sensitive information from disclosure along with appropriate information security. Mandatory U.S. government-wide policies governing handling of unclassified acquisition information exist because of concerns about exploitation by sophisticated adversaries. Executive Order 13556, signed by then-President Barack Obama on November 4, 2010, established a government-wide program for managing CUI, which includes personally identifiable information, proprietary business information, and law enforcement investigation information, among others. As the CUI executive agent, the National Archives and Records Administration is responsible for addressing over 100 ways of characterizing CUI, which it has done in the September 2016 CUI Federal Register. The rules in this register came into effect on November 14, 2016. This report provides a closer look at the current state of the CUI program as well as how the new CUI rules might affect DoD acquisition data management. We found a high degree of overlap in the content, if not the nomenclature, of past and present CUI labels used for acquisition data, but the problem going forward is translating policy into practice.

Genre: Computers / Database Administration & Management (fancy, right?)