Sen. Collins says no to WH cybersecurity coordinator

Under normal circumstances, Senators Joseph Lieberman (ID-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R.-Maine) are the best of friends, and share the leadership as chairman and ranking minority member, respectively, of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Over the years, as control of Congress and the Senate has shifted from one party to another, they have exchanged these roles on this important congressional oversight committee.

But now, both lawmakers find themselves at odds over the future of the White House cybersecurity coordinator job, at a time when President Obama still has not named someone to the position that more than five months ago was deemed an important priority for his administration.

Just last Friday, Lieberman reported that he and Collins were drafting a bill codifying the powers of the still-to-be-named White House cybersecurity coordinator. But the fact that they're drafting the bill together does not necessarily mean they see eye to eye on the matter during the drafting process.

In a speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce last Friday, Lieberman said that he favored Senate confirmation hearings for the new coordinator. That marks the first time Lieberman has publicly made such a statement.

But yesterday, Collins addressed the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University, where she announced that she and Lieberman, for the moment, are agreeing to disagree on the cybersecurity coordinator job.

Now some have suggested that this effort can best be led from the White House. I've reached a different conclusion. Truly securing our nation's information technology infrastructure will require more than high-level strategy and coordination. There must be agressive oversight, evaluation, and testing of systems. There must be constant real-time monitoring of security, and analysis of threats. In short, effectively managing government cybersecurity is going to take more than a few staff crammed into a cublcle in the depths of the White House.

And, as she has noted in Homeland Security committee hearings on the subject, Collins also notes that while the intelligence community must play a role, particularly providing vital classified information on cyberthreats, it cannot lead the domestic cybersecurity effort for privacy and civil liberties reasons.

She believes the Department of Homeland Security is better suited to lead the nation's cybersecurity protection efforts than a White House-based cybersecurity coordinator. Collins also believes DHS could also serve as a point of contact to distribute best-practices information on cybersecurity to the private sector.

The Maine Republican, seen by many as a moderate conservative, points to the National Counterterrorism Center, which brings agencies together to assess terrorism data, as a good model for cyber coordination.

For some perspective on Senator Collins' speech at GW, we turned to Randy Sabett, a partner in the Washington D.C. law firm of Sonnenschien, Nath and Rosenthal. He specializes in their Internet, Commuinications and Data Protection Practice.

More importantly, he was a member of the "Commission on Cyber Security for the 44th Presidency", which wrote a major document on the subject that ended up on President Obama's "must read" pile shortly after Inauguration Day. Sabett says that report argues for a cybersecurity coordinator, inside the White House and confirmed by the Senate, just as Senator Lieberman is proposing, and not someone detailed to DHS as proposed by Collins.

The person may not be able to get the job done, because they won't be able to get into some other agency, or some other entity, and say, "we know there's this problem, and we want you to do the following." If it's a coordinator position that's inside the office of the President, and it's been Senate-confirmed, you have somebody who has the imprimatur, first of all, of being at that level, and second of all, it's someone who all the different entities that make up the cybersecurity fabric know that that person carries the authority with them.

Sabett predicts that any eventual solution that does not conclude with a White House cybersecurity coordinator confirmed by the Senate is doomed to failure.

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On the Web:

Sen. HSGAC - Full text of Sen. Collins' speech to GW Homeland Security Policy Institute, 11/02/2009

Federal News Radio - White House cybersecurity coordinator still unnamed after five months

WFED/Associated Press - US cyber center opens to battle computer attacks

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