In anticipation of the release of a White House cybersecurity report later this week, Senate Commerce Chairman John (Jay) Rockefeller and Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, urged the Obama administration on Wednesday to create an Office of the National Cybersecurity Advisor within the Executive Office of the President. The proposal is part of legislation they introduced earlier this year intended to improve the nation's safeguards against high-tech attacks. The advisor "must serve as the lead official on all cyber matters -- reporting directly to the President and coordinating with the intelligence community, government agencies, Congress, and the private sector," they said in a press release.
Rockefeller and Snowe also pressed Obama to create state and regional cybersecurity centers for small and medium sized businesses; increase federal cybersecurity R&D programs at the National Science Foundation; and require the National Institute of Standards and Technology to establish measureable cybersecurity standards and best practices that are applicable both to government and the private sector. Additionally, they called for the creation of an information sharing clearinghouse where government and industry work together in real time to identify cyber threats; and the creation of a cybersecurity advisory panel of experts from industry, academia, non-profits and civil liberty organizations to advise the president.
"The Obama administration has been hard at work on a comprehensive review of the cyber threat and we applaud their effort," Rockefeller and Snowe wrote. "We have learned the hard way in recent years that 'stovepiped' national security systems and failures in coordination can leave us vulnerable to attack, and that bureaucratic confusion can cripple our response to a disaster. We must apply these lessons to the threat of cyber attack. There is no room for error." White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters that the report, which caps off an expansive 60-day probe, will be released Friday.
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