[Infowarrior] - OpEd: Let's not replace Hathaway

[Richard Forno]

White House ‘Cyber Czar’ Resigns; Let’s Not Replace Her.
	• By Michael Tanji
	• August 3, 2009  |
	• 4:16 pm  |

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/08/white-house-cyber-czar-resigns-good-riddance/


The White House’s acting “cyber czar” just resigned, with no permanent  
replacement in sight. Which is just fine. We can make more progress on  
the network security front without such a “czar.”

For starters, we’ve had reasonable facsimiles of cyber czars before —  
to little effect. The studies have been done, the list of tasks  
complete, yet we continue to fail year after year.

Second, the cyber czar, like most actual royalty in the world these  
days, is destined to be more figurehead than Sun King. He (or she)  
would have no power of service providers or industries that are both  
the underpinnings of cyber space and the victims of online assaults.  
Despite grandiose claims to the contrary, the government has very  
little direct impact on how safe national resources are online.

Finally, even if the czar did have a lot more pull with industry than  
he actually would; how does she put that juice to good use? Given that  
the czar and the individual with the power to make things happen in  
cyber space are not the same person: she doesn’t.

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.

Forget trying to shoe-horn technology stars into government cyber  
security jobs (a worthy if doomed-from-the-start experiment) or  
creating more useless bureaucracy with another czar. We need a  
facilitator - someone with a lot of betweenness and closeness, to use  
some social networking terms - to make sure that the right people are  
talking, sharing, and collaborating as they best see fit.  
Collaboration is key to improving security and collaboration comes  
from trust, not edicts from the Kremlin.  We’re not going to abandon  
our bureaucracies, so let’s move forward using that age-old mechanism  
for getting things done in bureaucracies: IKAGWKAG (”I know a guy who  
knows a guy”). The guy who knows the most guys is the guy you want in  
this job. Find him, and then sit back and watch what happens when you  
stop fighting real problems with a Visio diagram.