Washington D.C.

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Yesterday, I was honored to again have the opportunity to participate as a speaker at the Internal Revenue Service’s Nationwide Tax Forum 2019 in Washington, D.C. Through a generous grant provided by the American Coalition for Taxpayer Rights to the Pell Center of Salve Regina University, we are able to educate small- and medium-sized tax…

On January 25, 2018, oral arguments were heard in Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) v. the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) case by a D.C. Circuit panel. The court questioned EPIC’s standing to contest the FAA’s regulations, which cover all Americans; EPIC alleges that the FAA’s omission of privacy safeguards in its small unmanned aerial systems…

Last week, a D.C. federal judge ruled that an investigative reporter was not entitled to a 2014 cybersecurity study performed by an outside vendor detailing vulnerabilities in the Federal Election Commission’s information technology infrastructure.

David Levinthal made a Freedom of Information Act request in July 2015 contending that the study was essential to aid the public’s understanding of the FEC’s operations during the upcoming election season.  The study was designed to determine the extent of weaknesses in the FEC’s systems and whether the agency should adopt guidelines recently published by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology. While the FEC produced 1,450 pages of records in response to the FOIA request that referenced the study, it refused to release the full study.Continue Reading Federal Court Rules that FEC Cybersecurity Study is Exempt from FOIA Disclosure

The first meeting of the Unmanned Aircraft Safety Team (UAST) was held on October 18-19 in Washington, D.C. This team was first announced back in August by Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) Administrator Michael Huerta at the White House Drone Day. This team includes a wide variety of stakeholders from drone aviation industries and government stakeholders.…

Since the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) started allowing commercial drone operations, media organizations have moved quickly to get their own news-gathering drones in the skies. Recently, Sinclair Broadcast Group (Sinclair) (operator of 173 television stations across the U.S.) announced that it was going “all in” on its news-gathering drone fleet. Sinclair plans to have 80…

MedStar Health has announced that it has shut down its electronic medical record system after confirming that it has been struck with malware.

MedStar indicated that it doesn’t yet know whether the virus is ransomware similar to other recent attacks against health care entities, but that no protected health information has been compromised. MedStar, which…