FWC Reporting “Experts Find Fault With Cyberdirectives”
Feb 19th, 2008 by John Gerber
Federal Computer Week news editor, Jason Miller, is reporting “Experts find fault with cyberdirective.” I will not copy the whole article; just enough of these interesting quotes to provide a news summary. Glenn Schlarman, a former OMB official in charge of security policy, makes the very important point “To solve the security problem, they want to use intelligence monitoring? There are starkly different needs and purposes for intelligence gathering and computer security.” Several former OMB officials are stating the National Security Presidential Directive 54/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23 authorizing intelligence monitoring of all federal agency network violates the Computer Security Act of 1987, the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002, and the Privacy Act of 1974.
Bruce McConnell, who was at OMB for 15 years and was chief of the information policy and technology branch for many years, told House lawmakers last week, “It is impossible for DOD to balance the needs of security and monitoring.” Jim Dempsey, the Center for Democracy and Technology’s policy director, points out that “People have consistently concluded that this kind of secrecy slows down the responsiveness and effectiveness of responding.” Dempsey goes on to say, “For McConnell, this is the latest chapter in a 20-year effort.” John Michael “Mike” McConnell is the director of national intelligence. Schlarman concludes, “Either no one raised these concerns, or they finally got into a situation where they went above the OMB staff level and to the White House staff and convinced them it was the right thing to do.”
Please see Jason’s article for more details.
[...] in my post, “FWC Reporting “Experts Find Fault With Cyberdirectives,” I quoted Glenn Schlarman, a former OMB official in charge of security policy who is now a [...]