Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Cyber Czar

Word on the street is: President Obama will appoint the new Cyber Coordinator ("Czar") next week. Inside scoop is that Frank Kramer will win the job. Kramer was an assistant Secretary of Defense under Bill Clinton and evidently did well during his interview with Obama's Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra.

Melissa Hathaway resigned from her Cyber post in the Obama administration, ostensibly because next week's appointment was too long coming. Hathaway's Cyberspace Policy Review (completed this past summer) provided "near-term" and "mid-term" action plans, which Hathaway presumably would have prefered to implement.

Another contender for the job, Howard Schmidt (President and CEO of something called the International Security Forum), is published on the net observing the US operates under of framework of '60's era security laws in a dramatically modified landscape of data storage and retrieval. There is a Cyber Security Act of 2009 in the works... perhaps you've heard about that... but law enforcement would like more leeway, the intelligence community is occasionally stymied under existing law... and of course, private citizens like you or I worry about "Big Brother" checking our email or chatroom activity.

Government, corporations and tech-saavy individuals increasingly have the ability to be all-knowing. There are laws against some of the damage tech-saavy people can do to your credit and identity but we need to do more to guide large organizations and public servants to keep us safe while occasionally allowing us to rant and rave in private.

Good luck Frank!!

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