Plausible Deniability

Just read Aaron Turner & Michael Assante’s excellent article in CSO Magazine, Freedom of the Cyber Seas, in which they compare and contrast the response in the 18th century by the United States to pirates on the high seas with today’s federal response to Internet crime.

This is a fascinating essay, prepared by two of the more cogent thinkers in the space today - Turner (with whom I work at the Institute for Applied Network Security and with whom I am working on a book) and Assante work at the Idaho National Laboratory - Turner manages security technology transfer and commercialization and Assante is INL’s infrastructure protection strategist.

The (somewhat) buried lead is:

[T]he nearly ubiquitous availability of powerful computing systems, along with the proliferation of high-speed networks, have converged to create a new version of the high seas–the cyber seas. The Internet has the potential to significantly impact the United States’ position as a world leader. Nevertheless, for the last decade, U.S. cybersecurity policy has been inconsistent and reactionary. The private sector has often been left to fend for itself, and sporadic policy statements have left U.S. government organizations, private enterprises and allies uncertain of which tack the nation will take to secure the cyber frontier…

That in itself is not a news flash - back in 2004 MIT Technology Review published a terrific piece by Eric Hellweg, Cyber Security’s Cassandra Syndrome which discussed the stalled and possibly addle-headed Bush administration approach to the problem of leadership of the effort to protect the nation’s computing infrastructure.

But Turner and Assante’s article is among the first mainstream media (well, mainstream industry media) pieces to clearly articulate not just the problem, but also to set forth specific steps that the next president of the United States (whomever that may be) should take, beginning with a pronouncement at the first State of the Union address:

…The president’s policy statement should open up a dialog to consider private- and public-sector initiatives to begin working on creative approaches to the growing number and severity of cyber incidents. Most importantly, a presidential declaration outlining the unalienable right of all nations and peoples to conduct commerce on global networks will set the tone for all cyber security efforts undertaken in the next administration.

Highly recommended reading, well thought-out and well done.