By Emelie Rutherford
Trying to asses what the Pentagon’s role in cybersecurity should be, the head of a congressional panel said he sensed the desire for the Pentagon and federal government to work more with private industry.
The House Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities heard from a disparate panel of cyber-experts last Friday: Shari Pfleeger, director of the Research Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection at Dartmouth College; Gerry Cauley, the chief executive officer at North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC); and Gregory Nojeim, the senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology.
Subcommittee Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) at the end of the hearing gave a summary of the panelists’ shared views.
“One (shared view of the three panelists) is that the government does need to take some action, that…continuing as we are without some additional action would be a mistake,” Thornberry said. “Secondly, that there needs to be some further action in the form of incentives, regulation, to encourage…or mandate a general increase in cybersecurity. Third, that at a minimum the Department of Defense should ensure that the appropriate entities in the private sector have access to more of the information that the Department of Defense has in order to protect those private networks better.”
Nojeim, from the Center for Democracy and Technology, said Thornberry’s summary is a “good starting point.”
He added he sense a “general consensus” about the desire to provide greater access to the cyber-related information the government has.
Pfleeger added she thinks the government “could encourage private-sector initiatives that already are good behavior, they already are examples of private enterprise making data public, collaborating in various ways.”