More than three years ago, I wrote about a client’s attempt to get government to wake up to the need for cyber-security:

The work that CSIA does goes beyond just making your computer safe from viruses. The Executive Director, Paul Kurtz, and I have had discussions of the larger issue here: our ever-increasing connectedness, from information to electricity to most everything you can think of. How this connectedness relates to politics I will leave for a future post. Suffice to say for now that I’m glad smart people like Paul are thinking about these issues, because they affect us all in more ways than most of us ever consider.

Already the public took the issue very seriously, with 64 percent of adults in a survey I conducted in May of 2005 agreeing with the statement that “Government needs to make protecting our information systems and networks a higher priority.” But according to a New York Times story on a Center for Strategic and International Studies report, government didn’t get very far:

“The damage from cyber attack is real,” the report states. “Last year, the Departments of Defense, State, Homeland Security, and Commerce, NASA and the National Defense University all suffered major intrusions by unknown foreign entities.”

The report describes a laundry list of serious break-ins ranging from the hacking of the secretary of Defense’s unclassified e-mail to the loss of “terabytes” of data at the State Department.

Thank goodness the Wall Street Journal is reporting that President-elect Obama is bringing change in the form of my old friend and client:

Mr. Obama, who promised to make cyber security a top priority, has created a separate group on his transition team dedicated to cyber security, led by Paul Kurtz, a member of the commission and a former cyber-security aide to the National Security Council in the Clinton and Bush administrations, according to several people familiar with the transition. A handful of other commissioners also are working for the transition.

Some of the commission’s recommendations parallel proposals Mr. Obama made on the campaign trail. Mr. Obama criticized the Bush administration for being too slow to address cyber threats and vowed to create “a national cyber adviser” who would report directly to the president.

Mr. Obama knows what the public has long known: government has some catching up to do.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 8th, 2008 at 11:29 pm and is filed under Barack Obama, Connectedness, My Clients. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.