The FBI has been trumpeting an apparently unprecedented action – obtaining a court order from U.S. District Judge Vanessa Byrant permitting taking over servers that had been communicating with a “botnet” called Coreflood, a malicious software that infects Microsoft windows-based computers. Coreflood is designed to steal usernames, passwords and financial information.
Yesterday marked the first time that I was involuntarily displaced from my workplace since 9/11. Thankfully, it wasn’t the imminent threat of an attack; rather, the overflowing Potomac River was to blame…or was it? Though Mother Nature may have caused the river to rise, as Ted Steinberg emphasizes, “natural” disasters are more often the work of humans than nature. Hopefully the flooding incident reminds Washingtonians why efforts to enhance our preparedness must remain a priority almost ten years after 9/11.
Please join the GW Homeland Security Policy Institute for a discussion about Presidential Policy Directive – 8: National Preparedness, featuring Brian Kamoie, Senior Director for Preparedness Policy on the White House National Security Staff. President Barack Obama signed a new Presidential Policy Directive on National Preparedness last week and the Directive will be publicly released at this event.
Since the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) challenging early days, when I served as Undersecretary for Border and Transportation Security, we have made progress towards better border security. While this progress should be noted, without a doubt, more needs to be accomplished. Here are three priorities on which we should focus our border control efforts, foremost among them, a visa exit system.
I recently joined the board of directors for The Constitution Project, a think tank that provides scholarship and bipartisan policy recommendations on constitutional issues in the criminal justice and rule of law arenas. Maintaining an effective criminal justice system and upholding the Constitution requires a collective effort from throughout the public and private sectors, and the Constitution Project supports this.
The Coast Guard is an integral part of DHS, though it has never gotten its fair share of resources. That is nowhere more the case than when it comes to fulfilling its responsibilities for looking after U.S. interests in the Arctic. DHS Inspector General recently concluded that the Coast Guard has neither sufficient ships nor budgetary authority to accomplish its current missions.
When Americans think of “foreign assistance,” they usually think of us helping other countries. Yet, in recent years, other countries have tried to help America in its time of need, with haphazard and embarrassing results. It would be prudent for the United States to develop a reliable process by which to accept help from other countries when it is needed.
David Olive asks a fair question – why did it take the Department of Homeland Security so long to dump the color-coded alert system? I first called on the department to dump the idea in 2004. It was a bad idea because it failed to meet the basic criteria of an effective risk communication tool – the capacity to deliver a message that was understandable, actionable and credible.
Every man, or nation, for themselves might be the best mantra for cybersecurity. The recently released results of a cyber summit organized by the EastWest Institute concluded as much. In short, an international treaty might be unattainable. The right approach to cyber governance is to begin with the premise that all national security challenges are a series of actions and counteractions between competitors, and inquiring how these competitions might progress in the future.
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