At a glance.
- Constellation guides new defense tools out of research limbo.
- Censure motion filed in connection with Greece’s surveillance scandal.
Constellation guides new defense tools out of research limbo.
The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently launched Constellation, a new partnership with Cyber Command focused on transitioning the Department of Defense’s (DoD) pilot technologies into operational use. Historically, many capabilities would end up in a sort of research and development limbo affectionately nicknamed “the valley of death,” but Constellation aims to rescue new tech from purgatory and make sure it’s put to good use.
The Register spoke with Tejas Patel, Constellation’s program manager, to discuss how the program is creating a roadmap to make the research and development process clearer and more structured. Patel’s background is in cybersecurity, making him uniquely qualified to help shepherd defense tech from the development phase into the hands of DoD warfighters. He discusses Cyber Hunting at Scale, or CHASE, a defense program which helps identify and prioritize network connections that might be vulnerable to risk. The Constellation program takes such tools and integrates them into the systems cyber defenders are already using on a daily basis in order to demonstrate how they could work in the real world. Patel says the future of the Constellation program will depend on how many pilot tools the program selects to develop and whether it demonstrates value across multiple defense organizations. “I like to think of it as everything else DARPA does: It’s an experiment, and that’s what we’re going to do, we’re going to experiment,” Patel states.
Censure motion filed in connection with Greece’s surveillance scandal.
The head of Greece's opposition party, former Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, yesterday submitted a censure motion against the ruling party following allegations that current Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has been using spyware to keep tabs on Greek citizens. On Tuesday Tsipras revealed the findings of an investigation conducted by the independent telecommunications privacy authority ADAE, which concluded that the Greek government had been spying on officials including the energy minister and army chiefs. Before announcing the censure motion, Tsipras told parliament, "For the past six months, Greek society has been witness to disclosures of an inconceivable number of phone taps, the deepest deviation from rule of law that the country has seen in its modern history…We have a historic duty to act.” As Reuters recounts, an official investigation into the wiretapping scandal has been underway since August, when leader of the socialist PASOK party Nikos Androulakis alleged that EYP, the country's intelligence service, wiretapped his conversations in 2021. The government has denied any wrongdoing, and last month parliament passed a bill reforming EYP and prohibiting the sale of spyware in the country.