White House Circulating Draft of Executive Order On Cybersecurity

New submitter InPursuitOfTruth writes with news that the Obama administration has been circulating a draft of an executive order focused on cybersecurity. This follows the recent collapse of an attempt at cybersecurity legislation in the Senate. According to people who have seen the draft, the order would codify standards and best practices for critical infrastructure. That said, it's questionable how effective it would be, since participation would be voluntary, and the standards would be set by "an inter-agency council that would be led by the Department of Homeland Security." The other agencies involved would include NIST, the DoD, and the Commerce Dept. "It would be left up to the companies to decide what steps they want to take to meet the standards, so the government would not dictate what type of technology or strategy they should adopt."

Comments

How about some basic guidelines?

[Xenkar]

Rule 1 of critical national infrastructure: Don't put it on the damned internet.
Rule 2: See rule 1.
Rule 3: Are you sure you saw rule 1? Quadruple check anyway.
Rule 4: Manufacture everything pertaining to the critical national infrastructure in your own country (microchips, resistors, diodes, final assembly, etc)
Rule 5: Keep it simple.

Now for big business:
Rule 1: Don't let anyone leave your office with a notebook or any form of portable media containing sensitive customer information unless it is encrypted and heading to your off-site tape storage facility.
Rule 2: Don't let anyone hook their own computers and gadgets up to your network.
Rule 3: If it needs to be on the internet, have a nice firewall between it and the internet.
Rule 4: Have your web browsers running in sandboxes.

There, now we don't need feel good, ineffective legislation.

Voluntary ?

[Taco Cowboy]

That said, it's questionable how effective it would be, since participation would be voluntary

That "voluntary" part is inserted to throw off people so that they can't object to this executive order
 
After a while, the word "voluntary" would disappear, and participation would no longer be "voluntary" and the whole thing would be run by the Homeland Security or one of the many 3-alphabet-agencies
 
Count on it !
 
Cyber-security or whatever -security it might be, they are all designed to do one thing - to take away the freedom of the ordinary people and to concentrate all the power at the top
 

Re:Executive Orders vs. Checks & Balances

[girlintraining]

On one hand, efficacy and direct, immediate action.

No. There's been nothing efficient, fast, or direct about this. It's another power grab by the Department of Homeland Security, and pardon my french, but fuck them. They have incompetently managed every resource assigned to them, whether it's investigating domestic crime, securing airports, or anything else. They've created gulag prison camps within our borders to throw protesters in, encouraged the usurpation of local and state laws to further their interests, they irradiate their citizens and workers alike to the point that cancer clusters are now showing up in TSA screeners that are well-beyond being able to be dismissed as a statistical abnormality, and the list goes on.

And now they want a master kill switch for the internet, to dictate terms about how all our communications infrastructure is organized, and they have deep connections with media organizations -- of which only a few need to be manipulated to suppress information at the national level. The Department of Homeland Security has become the Ministry of Truth, and thanks to clever and covert manipulation of the media and the occasional use of deadly force and questionable laws, has all but silenced dissent or even knowledge of what its activities are.

No. It's gone too far. It no longer matters to me how well-intentioned or beneficial a proposal is; If it is administered or requested by Homeland Security, my advice is to resist it in any way you reasonably can... they're a dangerous and corrupt organization, unamerican and destructive of the very means it seeks to protect. I'd rather have a hundred Osama Bin Ladens out there plotting the downfall of my country than to turn over my personal safety and security to a bunch of incompetent bureaucrats -- at least in the former case, I know who my enemies are.