The president's much-ballyhooed $30 billion cybersecurity initiative faces a major hurdle, Forbes.com reports -- government secrecy, which may keep the private sector from playing its part.
"There's very little transparency as to the government's plans," says Bruce McConnell, a former information technology policy director for the White House's Office of Management and Budget who now works as a private consultant. "To protect critical infrastructure, we need to create trustworthy mechanisms for sharing information. That can't happen when one side's position is secret."
The initiative was a major topic of conversation at the RSA Conference on information security last week.*
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*The need for private sector partnership was a new wrinkle in Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Michael Chertoff's speech on the cyber initiative at the conference--one of the first public discussions of the classified program. Chertoff asked the audience to imagine a situation in which hackers took control of the nation's air traffic control system, comparing the threat to the Sept. 11th attacks. "So many of our national assets are in the hands of the private business," he said. "We can't be serious about national security or national cyber security without engaging with the private sector, and not just those in IT, but power plants, financial systems and transportation." *
*But given that much of the cyber initiative remains classified--including key details like the anatomy of the government's new networking monitoring technology and the degree to which it will be deployed on private sector networks--building trust with the private sector will be difficult, McConnell argues. The problem, he says, is the little-discussed role of the National Security Agency in the project, in partnership with the DHS and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. *
"The intelligence community, which is leading this effort, has a tradition of overclassifying information," McConnell says. "So it's not surprising that there's an inappropriate level of classification in an area, which deserves broad public debate."
