Update on Obama's Proposed Office of the National Cyber-Security Advisor

Yesterday, our new and still growing website experienced a spike in traffic after our commentary was posted on Digg regarding proposed legislation from Senators Rockefeller and Snowe to transfer cyber-security duties from the Department of Homeland Security to a new advisor under the President. The article on the legislation referred to the power to shut down the internet under certain conditions and proposed additional regulation of the IT industry.

We’re encouraged that this interests and/or concerns people. We’d like to further link to a recent post from the Just-a-Regular-Guy blog commenting on the same story.

Also, we wanted to note that some obamabots at Digg seem to be trying to bury the story on the grounds that the headline doesn’t seem to have a connection between the proposal and Barack Obama. While we didn’t mention it in our original post, Obama has been quoted in support of the idea if not the specifics of the draft proposal. Here’s a snippit from Forbes magazine:

But the Obama team may also be quietly preparing another, less-flashy tech role. The president-elect has alluded to appointing a so-called “cyber adviser,” charged with protecting the government and critical infrastructure from a growing wave of hackers and cyberspies.

“As president, I’ll make cyber security the top priority that it should be in the 21st century,” Obama said in a rare mention of the issue in a speech at Purdue University last July. “I’ll declare our cyber-infrastructure a strategic asset and appoint a National Cyber Adviser who will report directly to me.”

Just to be clear to the Obamabots, we agree with the President that cyber-security is an important national security and law enforcement issue. We also think it is a sensitive issue and such legislation could stand a little public review and oversight even at this early stage so we decided to discuss it. Bush signed a very, very expensive piece of legislation towards the end of his presidency to address the issue in regards to government and military networks and we like to learn more about why DHS is not cutting it — if they aren’t — and if there are alternatives to the strong powers that are being proposed.