On the latest episode of StateScoop's Priorities Podcast, Duncan McCay, a corporal with the Kirkland, Washington, Police Department says his department is prioritizing patrol car safety and maintenance through the use of electronic inspection reporting. By using digital tags on each vehicle, Duncan says, the system enables real-time access to inspection data, allowing the department to address potential vehicle safety issues and ensure that critical emergency equipment is always available. By transitioning from paper logs to digital inspections, he says the department can perform pre-shift inspections in just minutes. By ensuring vehicles and equipment are accounted for, Duncan says, officers stay longer in communities where they're needed. "Not only do we want to make sure that our vehicles are in proper working order, obviously we need to get to wherever we're going, but we need to get there safely," he says.

New episodes of StateScoop’s Priorities Podcast are posted each Wednesday.

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Massachusetts Chief Information Officer Jason Snyder joins the latest episode of StateScoop’s Priorities Podcast to break down a new program designed to spur innovative AI solutions in the state. Snyder says the project, which started last January, connects university students with difficult challenges facing state agencies. But he says not only has the program yielded an unexpected number of productive solutions to government problems, but it’s also impressed officials into hiring eight of the first participants. “The students developed an AI that just in using human language: ‘I want to build a bridge.’ And it would come back and list all the policy associated with it and provide the actual links to that policy and references so they could click on it and access it,” Snyder says on the podcast. “The commissioner was blown away and actually hired the two students that worked on that project.”

New episodes of StateScoop’s Priorities Podcast are posted each Wednesday.

For more of the latest news and trends across the state and local government technology community, subscribe to the Priorities Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts,Soundcloud or Spotify.

After the devastating Hurricane Helene struck North Carolina last September, Gary Thompson, the state’s deputy hazard mitigation officer, says on StateScoop’s Priorities Podcast that the state hopes to make its stream gauges and flood warning system more resilient before next year’s storm season. Thompson says North Carolina plans to upgrade those critical communication systems with ultrasonic radar sensors and satellites so they can continue to predict flood zones, issue evacuation warnings and deliver critical information to residents about incoming storms. “One of the advantages is all the equipment is out of the water, so if there's a lot of rain, a lot of velocity, if we have the equipment high enough and stable enough for it to survive during that event,” Thompson says. Joining him is Taylor Kerby, founder of Triangle UAS, an equipment vendor that helped design North Carolina’s modern stream gauges, and Pattiy Torno, a longtime resident of Asheville, North Carolina, which was hit particularly hard by Hurricane Helene.

New episodes of StateScoop’s Priorities Podcast are posted each Wednesday.

For more of the latest news and trends across the state and local government technology community, subscribe to the Priorities Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts,Soundcloud or Spotify.

This year’s presidential election was the most secure on record, according to John Cohen, executive director of a program for countering hybrid threats at the nonprofit Center for Internet Security. On StateScoop’s Priorities Podcast, Cohen explains that despite receiving more than 100 bomb threats, years of preparation for Election Day 2024 enabled local election officials and law enforcement to continue voting operations with minimal disruption. “We looked at potential for physical threats, cyber threats, we looked at efforts to undermine confidence in the election process or confuse voters by foreign intelligence services and non-state threat actors. And then we began looking at potential for disruptive events, the use of swatting, bomb threats, white powder envelope, suspicious devices that would be used to disrupt voting and vote tabulation,” he says. Joining him is Marci Andino, senior director of CIS’s Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, who says that the threats election officials saw on Nov. 5 were precisely what they had been preparing for.

New episodes of StateScoop’s Priorities Podcast are posted each Wednesday.

For more of the latest news and trends across the state and local government technology community, subscribe to the Priorities Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts,Soundcloud or Spotify.

As Code for America and Georgetown University’s Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation kick off their second annual FormFest on Wednesday, StateScoop checks in with Amanda Renteria, Code for America’s chief executive, to hear about this year’s event will be different. Renteria says the goal this year is to drive government agencies to action, making their forms digital and accessible. “How do we make this more actionable, so it’s not just a discussion but we’re really taking through different solutions from different governments, how they are solving some of these problems, how they are making it better for people,” she tells StateScoop’s Sophia Fox-Sowell. She points to a federal study that, several years ago, found that only 2% of federal forms had been digitized. She says the work states are doing now to improve their online services, though, are cutting down on the billions of hours Americans spend filling their information into forms.

New episodes of StateScoop’s Priorities Podcast are posted each Wednesday.

For more of the latest news and trends across the state and local government technology community, subscribe to the Priorities Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts,Soundcloud or Spotify.

On this week's Priorities Podcast, a researcher from the International Association of Privacy Professionals says that the past year has brought "novel innovations" in state privacy laws as each state attempts to solve the growing challenges of protecting personal information collected by businesses and other organizations. Muge Fazlioglu, a principal researcher for privacy law and policy at the association, tells StateScoop that many states are exhibiting new "digressions" from the state privacy law templates of years past. As instances of innovations in law, she points to Minnesota's provisions designed to protect people from profiling, Rhode Island's requirement that businesses disclose lists of specific third-parties companies share data with and Maryland's data minimization framework. Fazlioglu says many experts are now looking ahead to 2025, when several new state data privacy laws will come into effect, including in Delaware, Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey and Tennessee. This fact alone will make 2025 “a landmark year” for data privacy, she says.

New episodes of StateScoop’s Priorities Podcast are posted each Wednesday.

For more of the latest news and trends across the state and local government technology community, subscribe to the Priorities Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts,Soundcloud or Spotify.

On the latest episode of StateScoop’s Priorities podcast, Maryland’s Senior Director of State Cybersecurity Lance Cleghorn talks about the state’s first bug bounty program, which saw white-hat hackers discovering over 40 vulnerabilities on the state’s websites. Cleghorn says the program was inspired by a similar program called “Hack the Pentagon,” that he and Maryland’s chief information officer, Katie Savage, ran when they worked together at the Department of Defense’s Defense Digital Service — which is part of the reason Cleghorn says he followed Savage to Maryland’s Department of Information Technology. Cleghorn also shares his perspective about why bug bounty programs are so successful as opposed to other methods of finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and offers insight into the future of bug bounty programs in the state.

On the latest episode of StateScoop’s Priorities podcast, Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, talks about a new report he authored for the organization that contains legislative recommendations for states rolling out digital ID programs. Since the release of the ACLU’s last report on the programs in 2021, several states have added digital ID capabilities, but Stanley says the current landscape for digital IDs is immature. However, he talks about ways for state legislators to create a digital ID system that protects privacy and equity, which includes technical recommendations as well as policies about how law enforcement can access the IDs.

One year after publishing an artificial intelligence “action plan” last October, an official from New York City’s Office of Technology & Innovation says work is progressing ahead of schedule. Alex Foard, the office’s executive director of research and collaboration, says 30 of 37 actions were completed, one more than than the office had planned for in the initiative’s first year. Foard said the city’s AI work has been focused on translating policy actions into “pragmatic things” that agencies can use to support their work. The next year, Foard says, will include a heavier emphasis on public engagement and external partnerships. “The partnership emphasis really is one of the most important pieces out of the action plan because it's an acknowledgement that we as a city have a lot of internal expertise related to AI but we're also in New York City where we have access to any number of high-end academic institutions, a very health tech industry and all of these groups are rich with their own expertise and their own guidance that we can use to help inform our own policy.”

New episodes of StateScoop’s Priorities Podcast are posted each Wednesday.

For more of the latest news and trends across the state and local government technology community, subscribe to the Priorities Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Soundcloud or Spotify.

On the latest episode of StateScoop’s Priorities podcast, Samuel Alva, a technical adviser with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, explains the “huge” threat facing the nation’s tens of thousands of water utilities, and what they can do to protect themselves. “Water is a single point of failure. So that's why it has been under attack,” he says. CISA is among the organizations assisting the water sector, including by providing cybersecurity assessments of their operational technologies. Alva says it’s a “daunting” task helping thousands of utility operators become trained on a technical topic that hasn’t traditionally been in their wheelhouse. But a promising cybersecurity training program in Kansas is gaining attention from other states, including California, Maryland and Texas.

New episodes of StateScoop’s Priorities Podcast are posted each Wednesday.

For more of the latest news and trends across the state and local government technology community, subscribe to the Priorities Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Soundcloud or Spotify.