Cyber Job at White House

In Politico today is an interesting story about the senior cyber advisor to the White House.  Politico says it is about to be abolished and decries that it will be when we are worried about other attacks by Russians in the midterm elections in November.  Don’t even take time to read these claims.

In the Obama Administration the position was almost worthless and did nothing to coordinate or consolidates positions for the White House.  The article says Obama created this position, which is far from the truth.   It is also not a position that was established to deal with threats like the Russians or Iranians meddling in U.S. Elections.  We have a National Security Agency to do things like that.

If the White House position were abolished today nobody would care.  It was never used for the purpose it was originally established — coordinating between government and commercial entities in the infrastructure to make those computer systems more secure.  It hasn’t written a policy document worth reading in the last 10 years.  It certainly has not had a hand in securing the electoral systems in any of the states, which is Homeland Security’s role, though they must be “invited in” to do it.  Most states don’t want Federal help in this area and they proved it when the Russians tried to get into state systems in 2015-2016.  Very few of those states asked for help.  This is the kind of role the White House should have been engaged in, but didn’t.

There were plenty of chances to get into the infrastructure security issues.  China is stealing code-signing certificates and using them to establish fake networks.  Some businesses are having counterfeit network devices sold as their own.  ZTE and Huawei are being banned from some US sales for reasons we seem to not know.  The Russians were into social media exploitation and the White House was not exactly leading the way on trying to find out how or why that was going on.  It wasn’t opportunities that led to the idea that there was no longer a need for a person to lead Cyber in the White House.  It was the lack of leadership on issues that were important that brought us to where the Politico article says we are today.