March 8th, 2009
U.S.'s cybersecurity director has resigned.
Rod Beckstrom, an author and Silicon Valley entrepreneur, has resigned the position of National Director of Cybersecurity.
Mr. Beckstrom’s position, which reported to the head of DHS, involved wrestling the all of the different Federal agencies into forming a coherent cybersecurity policy.
His role appeared to have been crippled from the start. According to the WSJ, Mr. Beckstrom’s office “was funded for just five weeks out of the past year and had just five people working in it. During the rest of the period, he borrowed staff and office space from other agencies.”
This sounds like it was a job that bordered on the impossible. It is difficult enough to move a government organization. It is even harder to move several organizations to the same point. Making all of those organizations move at the tempo of information security events probably proved to be far more difficult than the previous two tasks.
Adam J. O'Donnell, Ph.D. is an R&D engineer who has focused on computer security since 2000. He currently is the Director of Emerging Technologies at Cloudmark, a messaging security company located in San Francisco. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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