Giuliani's bona fides for this role apparently spring from his time as chair of the "Cybersecurity, Privacy and Crisis Management Practice" at the New York law firm Greenberg Traurig,
a position he assumed a year ago. However, it's not clear that Giuliani
has ever had any direct experience in cybersecurity law or policy.
Giuliani previously was a partner in a Houston-based international law firm Bracewell (formerly
Bracewell & Giuliani) for over 10 years, and he ran his own
security consulting firm based on his mayoral experience and credibility
from New York City's measures taken after the September 11, 2001 terror
attack. But Giuliani is really counting on private industry to provide
all the answers.
"The President-elect decided that he wanted to
bring in on a regular basis the private sector—the corporate leaders in
particular and thought leaders in particular for cyber, because we're
so far behind," said Giuliani. "And it's his belief which I share, that a
lot of the solutions are out there, we're just not sharing them. It's
like cancer—there's cancer research going on all over the place. You'd
almost wish they'd all get together in one room, and maybe they'd find a
cure."
Giuliani said he believes that industry will
have to lead an answer to cybersecurity rather than government. "That's
where we have the great creativity and we have the huge amount of money,
and that's where we have these great companies, the greatest in the
world," Giuliani said this morning. "So the idea here is to bring
together corporate leaders and their technological people. The president
will meet with them on an ongoing basis, as well as anyone else in the
administration… I'll coordinate the whole thing."
The goal appears to be a one-way flow of
information from industry to the government. "Number one, it'll give the
government all the information available in the private sector,"
Giuliani explained. "Number two, it'll form a little more connection
between these people who are doing cybersecurity so they can work with
each other. Some of these people, you put one and two together, you're
going to come up with six."
Much of the private sector already shares
information with each other, so it's not really clear what benefit other
than presidential face time corporate executives and "technological
people" will get out of this proposed arrangement. The financial
industry, for example, has the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center;
the auto, aviation, telecommunications, health, retail, and
transportation industries, among others, all have their own
organizations as well.
It's not clear what roles any ISAOs will have
in this new cybersecurity body, or even who the "thought leaders"
Giuliani wants to participate will be. But Giuliani apparently wants to
include foreign cybersecurity firms, including some from Israel. "They
have tremendous cyberdefense research," he said this morning. "We don't
get access to that over here."
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