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Cybersecurity Czar Job Is Useless, Says Spafford
Trailrunner7 writes "It's been about seven months since Obama announced his plan to hire a cybersecurity coordinator, and the job is still vacant. Several prominent security experts have turned the position down, and in an interview on Threatpost, Purdue professor Gene Spafford says that the position is pointless. 'It won't have any statutory authority. It won't have any budgetary authority. That does not give it much authority of any kind. So when I hear that there are supposedly people who have been interviewed for this cyber coordinator job and didn't take it, I'm not surprised. It's not a winning position. I'm not at all surprised by the fact that it's empty. That position is a blame-taking position,' Spafford said."
...for me? It has Czar in the title, it has to pay more than what I make.
I'll take it. I've even worked in security, although as a programmer not as an executive or highly respected author and lecturer (e.g., Bruce Schneier) which is what I imagine they want and will never get.
Where do I send my resumé?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I'm not sure a tzar helps. The people on the front line are independant businesses selling cyber security and the military. The two do not meet openly so the position is merely cerimonial.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
..won't have any statutory authority. It won't have any budgetary authority. But it WILL have FarmVille.
See his blog post
Someone who's actually paid to be the goat.
I can do that! Were can I get a job like that.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
A real security czar would be the man or woman behind the curtain. With a limp, a raspy voice, and insist that they are always watching us watching them watch other people who watch Ebay watching people selling watches trying to find the best watch to buy. Even when the security czar knows that everyone just uses cell phones now instead of watches. Thats why he must watch the watch watchers.
"It won't have any statutory authority. It won't have any budgetary authority. That does not give it much authority of any kind"
Kinda represents the majority of IT departments in big corporations.
Tom Ridge was nothing but the designated fall guy at the Dept. of Homeland Security, but he managed to parlay it into a book deal and a ton of great press. Not bad for a guy who had formerly been an almost completely unknown governor of a minor state. You think anyone would have given a rat's ass about his memoirs if he had turned that job down?
If you can be a fall guy who manages to get out BEFORE the fall, there is real money and fame in it.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Anyone else (unemployed and looking like me) feel like a disturbing portion of the job market is constituted of 'blame taking positions'?
It's probably paranoia, but I feel like the businessworld is composed of corrupt people who will lie and bullshit, and then the poor saps that get stuck with the 'blame taking positions'.
In my youth, I had naive libertarian beliefs about talented and competent people winning out in the free market against those types. Now that I've witnessed the naked annihilation of even the illusion of capitalism, via the bank bailouts... I just have no real hope that there is any way to make a living without either being one of those bullshitters, or poor blame taking saps. I guess the honorable thing is to just accept a sequence of blame taking jobs, and survive and get fed until we see a better age.
Truth be told, there are a lot of vacant EO jobs. Why? Well, there's a good chance Barack Obama will be a one-termer, so who wants to take a pay cut, move to Washington DC, and deal with all the government red tape for a 3-year job?
directly or indirectly -- on our system of information networks. They are increasingly the backbone of our economy and our infrastructure; our national security and our personal well-being."
And despite it all, he is totally unwilling to tell us we have the right to access. Just more bla bla bla..
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
My coworkers are always volunteering me ... I'm (modestly) that good!
Here's a photo of me on the job: http://www.frogview.com/uploadimages/45f9f6b1c0ed04.86765571frogview-gallery.jpg
It could be my chance to move out of my mom's basement!
The assertion that this is a 'blame taking' job is unfounded, that it doesn't have statutory or budget authority is peripheral to what the role should be, and frankly somewhat insulting that the umbrage taken with it by 'the experts' is that it's a role that has no teeth.
It's a job where the President consults you for your opinion and takes action based on your advice. Boo hoo you don't have any authority or a budget. Any consultant that is hired on to a tech firm is in the same boat.
Also, yeah, I can understand why many security people have turned this job down. Because they're more interested in money than civil service -- how the hell is that a surprise?
If we're serious... and I mean really serious... we need a branch of the military to do the heavy lifting. We don't need to start this in a big way, but we need the security infrastructure to build on should tensions begin rising with nation states. These guys would be the grunts doing the front line lifting and poking around while the NSA focuses it's talent on developing high level techniques. This is what we'd do if we got really serious.
In my view, the position of czar is a joke. Czars are for 19th century Russia and have no place in a modern United States government.
...Leo Laporte is *the* man for the job.
You must be new around here... Almost everything we do is worthless.
By my calculation there is a major difference between the position being "useless," meaning not necessary, and it being a position of relatively little glamor. Just because the position will likely take a lot of crap doesn't mean it's not a possibly important part of the puzzle.
But the drug czars have failed to stop drugs, so therefore a cybersecurity czar would improve cybersecurity!
I finally understand government logic!
A person with the skills in question can do productive work in the private sector, instead of being a tax-sucker.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Good - The last thing we need is for this or any similar position to have some real authority; it's likely only going to be a matter of time before anonymity and freedom online are ruined in the name of "security" anyways.
Arent all these positions created to put the supporters in to positions of power so that you can pay back for helping you get elected. Most of these top level positions are useless, except for political purposes.
Geez, look who's been confirmed.
An Attorney General who thinks it's OK to pick a fundamental Constitutional right and strip it from individuals.
A tax cheat in charge of the IRS.
A CIO who was strangely the ONLY one in his entire department that wasn't corrupt.
What "draconian disclosure requirements" are you referring to? These are the guys who were CONFIRMED in office.
Tell that to Philo Farnsworth. You forgot a step.
"Invent something great," have a few million on hand to defend your patent, "and you will do fine."
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
But a lot of us saw this a mile and a-half away. There are a lot of people involved close-up with POTUS' CyberSecurity initiative, and I had the honor of meeting one of the top brass in October. As excited as the people on the advisement staff seem or seemed to be, I could not shake the perception of trepidation in the voice and comments of the presenter. I even queried him about the "CyberSecurity Czar" (or "Director," as it is preferred to be called) and received a fairly vague answer with little notion of what will really happen.
All for show, in my estimation.
OK, now we have more steps:
1. Invent something great.
2. Have millions to defend your patent.
3. Have millions to beat the vulture capitalists away from your baby.
4. Have a mother on the board of IBM and a father as a partner in one of the nation's most powerful law firms.
5. Acquire the social connections to market your product.
6. Profit.
Bonus reading: The cheerful history of Edison and Tesla, and why virtue does not always win, even when Mickey Rooney plays you in the movie.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
... and many others, come to think of it.
an "organizational attenuator".
Someone has to dampen energy that might elsewise get into the mechanisms that matter to the the alphas.
In case anyone wants specifics, here is the "main" questionnaire you have to fill out if you're going to have any kind of security clearance (even a really low one) while working for the Gov.
http://www.opm.gov/Forms/pdf_fill/sf86.pdf
Also, note that lying on the SF86 is a felony. It's a terrifying, terrifying form.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Is that in response to those pictures of Mark Zuckerberg that got leaked off the facebook site after the privacy policy changes?
Umm... you actually make way less in the private sector. A USA Today article that appeared last week confirmed what many of us have suspected for years, especially since this recession started. And that is that government employees make more than private sector employees. Period. They make more in salary (approximately 30% more), they have far better benefits (healthcare, pension, etc), and they get more perks. It's not the working/middle class vs the wealthy anymore... the two classes we have now are apparently the unionized government aristocracy and all the private sector schmucks footing the bill for it all.
By the way, I know that in this article some government types tried to explain this away by claiming that salaries are so high because the government only fills really important jobs, and that if government employees took equivalent jobs in the private sector they would be getting paid less (all this was said without any evidence). My assertion (also without proof, but I think fairly likely) is that the people in government could not get the equivalent jobs in the private sector because they aren't qualified enough. Hence, they are still being overpaid. And my empirical evidence is that there really aren't any private sector organizations as disorganized, inefficient and generally inept as the federal government (just think about the failed TSA pdf redacting story that was on here the other day). Are our best and brightest really working there? Are people who would otherwise be qualified for important private sector jobs really giving up their salaries en masse so that they can join the ranks of "public servants"? Maybe at the cabinet secretary level this happens, but at pretty much all the other levels of the bureaucracy, I think not. If you work for the government, you are not a "servant", and all us serfs out in the private sector are overpaying you.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.