President Reagan and General Alexander on National Cyber Security

General Alexander

"In this present crisis," said President Ronald Reagan in his first inaugural address, "government is not the answer to our problem; government is the problem." Perhaps the former president's trenchant observation about the nation's economy is just as applicable to the present crisis in national cyber security.[1]

In a recent interview, General Keith Alexander, Commander, U.S. Cyber Command and Director, National Security Agency made an interesting observation. Speaking of the cyber threat to the nation, General Alexander noted that America’s adversaries “are aggressively stealing U.S. intellectual property [putting] the competitive edge of U.S. businesses at risk.” Putting it even more strongly, the general stressed that “the United States is on the losing side of the greatest transfer of wealth and treasure in history.”[2] That's the giant sucking sound you hear, unless you're completely deaf to these kinds of things.  It's happening right now as we speak.

Officers like General Alexander, and the rest of the Department of Defense in general, tend to take computer network security very seriously, apparently a lot more so than many other parts of the federal government.  The department’s emphasis on protecting our networks is keenly felt all the way down the chain of command. At Fort Gordon, for example, just this week, I and my teammates lost about 36 hours of productivity while information area security officers performed upgrades to our systems. Every year, everyone with computer access takes several hours of network security training. All of us maintain an up-to-date computer access cards, without which no access to the network is possible. Inspectors and security officers ensure that security regulations and policies are in place and closely followed. The list of security regulations, commanders' policies, training memoranda, agency updates, and "friendly reminders" are longer than a man's arm.

An awful lot of time and money are invested across the department to ensure that department employees, members of the uniformed services, and contractors know and follow all the rules. We do a pretty good job, I think, of protecting the data on our networks from ourselves—the good guys. When in the Sam Hill will the government start paying attention to people like General Alexander and get serious about protecting the nation’s data—it’s wealth and treasure—from the bad guys?

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[1] Ronald Wilson Reagan, 1st Inaugural Address, Washington, D.C., The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=43130 (accessed 14 December 2012).
[2] Interview, General Keith B. Alexander, Military Information Technology, Vol. 16, #20, 16-19.