DARPA Awards Contract for Humanoid Robots, How to Hack the Curiosity Mars Rover, and More

Here is today’s federal cybersecurity and information technology news:

A U.S. federal appeals court found that authorities do not need a probable-cause warrant to track suspects through their mobile phone GPS. More here.
A new bill, the Wireless Surveillance Act of 2012, has been proposed, however, that would apply home search standards to cell phone location requests among other limits. More here.
PC Magazine points out several possible methods to hack NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover. More here.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services launched an electronic quality reporting pilot for hospitals in its Medicare electronic health record incentive program. More here.
Federal Chief Technology Officer Todd Park discussed his digital government strategy in a recent interview. More here.
The Interagency Program Office is seeking potential solutions and approaches for a shared capability to document, monitor, forecast, and report immunization information for the Veteran’s Affairs and Department of Defense integrated electronic health record. More here.
American and Chinese think tanks discussed restricting the use of online attacks, better crisis communication, and mitigating the risk of attacks by third parties. More here.
The Department of Commerce Inspector General found that the Patent and Trademark Office needs to review their data processing systems or else their 600,000 patent backlog will grow. More here.
Through its Unconventional Processing of Signals for Intelligent Data Exploitation program, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency hopes to use unconventional computation and data representations for computationally intensive data analysis. More here.
The National Science Foundation is seeking public input on what should be in its application program interface (API). More here.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency issued a contract to “develop and build a set of identical humanoid robot systems.” More here.