It is really no surprise that the “security czar” of the United States has resigned. The job is a joke.
People familiar with the matter said Ms. Hathaway has been “spinning her wheels” in the White House, where the president’s economic advisers sought to marginalize her politically.
Cybersecurity is “a major priority for the president,” White House spokesman Nicholas Shapiro said, adding that the administration is “pursuing a new comprehensive approach to securing America’s digital infrastructure.” In the search to fill the top cyber post, “the president is personally committed to finding the right person for this job, and a rigorous selection process is well under way,” he said.
Ms. Hathaway had initially been considered a leading contender to fill the cyber post permanently. She lost favor with the president’s economic team after she said it should consider options for regulating some private-sector entities to ensure they secure their networks, said cybersecurity specialists familiar with the discussions. Being a holdover from the Bush administration didn’t help either, they said.
I’ve expressed my opinions on federal czars. They are not needed in a place billed as the “land of the free.” You can have security but not in conjunction with freedom of choice. Americans are not quite ready to trade all their freedoms away. To have information security they would have to give up ALL privacy and all expectations of data ownership – these would have to be ceded to professional bureaucrats and their minions. Every citizen and resident would have to be subjected to a monotonous litany of banality unsurpassed in human history.
For instance, it is likely that an annual “security training certification” would be needed for a resident or visitor to access any network in the nation if the federal government czars actually had their way. Such programs already exist. To access even the least important information imaginable in the military, one is required to complete a bevy of marginally useful flash presentations that remind that no expectation of privacy exists and that the user is always at fault when something goes wrong. Individuals should never take the initiative. All activity should be reported to the minders. Penalties for deviation apply. Violators will be dealt with in the harshest terms. Keep your head down citizen.
A nation-state that actually values freedom does not need a bureaucrat controlled behemoth agency to enforce policies and procedures from lofty air-conditioned glass towers. If we truly value freedom then we need small strike teams of information warriors ready to respond to threats and direct attacks on critical info infrastructure as needed. That’s it. No czars. No Bureau of Endless Mediocrity in Policy. These things will only what’s left of the nation’s soul.
Wired partly gets it, but only partly.
A “czar” position is the exact opposite of what we need to successfully defeat cyber space adversaries. The botnet that denies service to your governmental web sites might have been assembled by a Brazilian, who borrowed code from an Israeli, who launders his money through a Russian. None of them have met in person, and next month they may all switch roles – and throw in some Americans and Chinese to boot – for a totally different attack. A cyber czar is fighting a network with an org chart.
America doesn’t need the help of the fed to be technologically dominant. We just need government to get the hell out of the way. Sure, leave DARPA in place. Go ahead and create some military hacker programs. Have a secret MOS for that. But stop making up giant agencies with “czars” to head them that accomplish nothing at all, or if they do, are so incompetent at explaining how benefits outweigh burdens and costs that everyone just wants them to piss off.