According to a report by CNET’s Declan McCullagh, a draft bill in the U.S. Senate would grant President Obama “cybersecurity emergency powers” to disconnect and even seize control of private sector computers on the Internet.
Back in May, when Obama proposed a “cybersecurity czar with a broad mandate” and the administration issued a report outlining potential vulnerabilities in the government’s information security policies, I cautioned about the constant temptation by politicians in both parties to expand government authority over “critical’ private networks.” From American telecommunications to the power grid, virtually anything networked to some other computer would potentially be fair game for Obama to exercise “emergency powers.”
Policy makers should be suspicious of proposals to collectivize and centralize cybersecurity risk management, especially in frontier industries like information technology. When government asserts authority over security technologies, it hinders the evolution of more robust information security practices and creates barriers to non-political solutions—both mundane and catastrophic. The result is that we become less secure, not more secure.
Instead, the Obama Administration should limit its focus to securing government networks and keeping government agencies on the cutting edge of communications technology. As today’s news illustrates, the dangers created by such a broad mandate may come to pass.
Wayne Crews / Wayne Crews is vice president for policy and director of technology studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He started the Dysfunction Network as a side project. He is a dad of four.
Wayne's work explores the impact of government regulation of private activity: Areas of interest include antitrust and competition policy, safety and environmental issues, and information age concerns like privacy, online security, broadband policy, and intellectual property. Wayne is the author of the yearly report, Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State, and he co-authored the recent reports This Liberal Congress Went to Market? a Bipartisan Policy Agenda for the 110th Congress and Communications without Commissions: A National Plan for Reforming Telecom Regulation. Prior to the assorted government bailouts now taking place, he wrote the report Still Stimulating Like It’s 1999: Time to Rethink Bipartisan Collusion on Economic Stimulus Packages.
Wayne is co-editor of the books Who Rules the Net: Internet Governance and Jurisdiction (2003) and Copy Fights: The Future of Intellectual Property In the Information Age (2002). He is co-author of What’s Yours Is Mine: Open Access and the Rise of Infrastructure Socialism (2003), and a contributing author to others. He has published in the Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, Communications Lawyer, the International Herald Tribune and others. He has made various TV appearances on Fox, CNN, ABC, CNBC and the Lehrer NewsHour, and his regulatory reform ideas have been featured prominently in such publications as the Washington Post, Forbes and Investor’s Business Daily. He is frequently invited to speak, and has testified before congressional committees on various issues.
Earlier Wayne was a legislative aide in the United States Senate to Sen. Phil Gramm, covering regulatory and welfare reform issues. He was an Economist and Policy Analyst at Citizens for a Sound Economy Foundation, and has worked as an economist at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and as a Research Assistant at the Center for the Study of Public Choice at George Mason University. He holds an M.B.A. from William and Mary and a B.S. from Lander College in Greenwood, South Carolina. He was a candidate for state senate as a libertarian while at Lander.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.