This seems incredibly foolhardy, given recent developments regarding Russian hacking of our infrastructure. We also have the 2018 mid-terms coming up. I don’t understand why we wouldn’t want to try to prevent future tampering, even if we can’t agree on what happened in the past.
In short, I find this a troubling move that puts our country at risk.
I wouldn’t worry too much about this. As an exec with a Federal cyber contractor, I’m very familiar with what drives our cyber infrastructure.
By far the biggest player is still kicking along, and that’s DHS and their CDM program. Einstein protects the TICs and TICAPs, with the assistance of the evil empire/Booz. They NCCIC looks for systemic threats against critical infrastructure, and policy comes from what used to be called NPPD, along with help from NIST.
I’ll remember this the next time I get an alert on my credit from the service I get for free due to all the government data breaches that there have been.
The issue is not whether or not there are still cyber security programs and people in place. The issue is that there is no longer a central coordinating function across all agencies who sits on the National Security Council. Given that cyber security is one of the main fronts of international aggression in modern times, we should have someone in that role.
Sunny, that’s what I’m trying to say - DHS leads the charge in cyber coordination across the Feds. They also do a lot (although not as comprehensive) lower down the ladder, which is actually more relevant wrt elections. They protect sectors as varied as water treatment plants to private sector health organizations (which happens to be where my company works in).