America's pandemic response doesn't bode well for a potential cyberattack
Americas pandemic response doesnt bode well for a potential cyberattack
Opinion by
David Ignatius
Columnist
June 25, 2020 at 5:51 p.m. CDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/americas-pandemic-response-doesnt-bode-well-for-a-potential-cyberattack/2020/06/25/8031f094-b720-11ea-a510-55bf26485c93_story.html
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This stark message was contained in a little-noticed white paper recently released by the bipartisan Cyberspace Solarium Commission, titled Cybersecurity Lessons From the Pandemic. As the paper highlighted, the covid-19 outbreak has been a stress test for our national crisis-management system and that system has, to a frightening extent, failed. The challenges of a cyberattack would be even greater.
Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) and Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), the panels co-chairs, describe the disorganized response to covid-19 this way: The pandemic produces cascading effects and high levels of uncertainty. It has undermined normal policymaking processes and, in the absence of the requisite preparedness, has forced decision makers to craft hasty and ad hoc emergency responses.
President Trumps chaotic and sometimes counterproductive personal management of the covid-19 crisis has underlined the need for clear executive authority that can coordinate different federal agencies and state and local responders. Trump dismantled or disdained the management tools that might have been useful and seemed to develop a love-hate relationship with experts who could have helped frame a coherent response, such as Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
This problem of coordinating the executive branch in a national crisis was the centerpiece of a report issued in March by the Cyberspace Solarium Commission. The group brought together Congress, the executive branch and private experts to recommend how to cope with the threat of a crippling cyberattack. As the report was released, covid-19 was beginning to spread in the United States, and I wrote that the pandemic was a foretaste of what wed experience in a debilitating cyberattack. Now, after three months of White House missteps, the commissions findings are even more relevant.
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Eliot Rosewater
(31,097 posts)on election day.
Count on it.
GOd I hope patriots somewhere are ASSUMING this and at least trying to prevent it.
brush
(53,475 posts)Last edited Thu Jun 25, 2020, 09:50 PM - Edit history (1)
Vichy Water, anyone?