When in Doubt, Change the Code

When politicians are in doubt, they change the narative, often without changing anything else.  Such is the case of the new cyber initiative in the White House and Homeland Security, which is supposed to change the way groups respond to cyber threats.  They do this by assigning numbers from 0-5 characterizing the urgency of response.  Zero means there is an indistinguishable amount of damage that will be done.  Nobody reports something like that, so I wonder why anyone would bother making that categorization.

This idea is a joke that is not funny.  The audience looks nervously around like they may have missed something everyone else got, but there is no laughter in the room.  Only the comedians at Homeland Security get this joke and none of them are laughing either.  Of course, these are the same people who have changed the response levels to terrorism multiple times to reflect their new found wisdom about how we measure this kind of threat.  They have heard it before which takes some of the benefit out of hearing the joke said out loud.  The joke is that they actually believe this kind of change in policy does something to benefit our cyber responses.