From: Roll Call
By Tim Starks
By the reckoning of a new report by the left-leaning Center for New American Security, we screwed it up from the start when designing the architecture of digital computing — security just wasn’t drawn into those original blueprints. Now we have to live with it. The report, helmed by Richard Danzig, a former Navy secretary who currently serves as a member of the Defense Policy Board and The President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, makes recommendations on how.
Among the recommendations is adopting the following national security standard for cyberspace: “The United States cannot allow the insecurity of our cyber systems to reach a point where weaknesses in those systems would likely render the United States unwilling to make a decision or unable to act on a decision fundamental to our national security.”
The report continues: “The suggested standard implies, for example, that if we thought an opponent could use cyber tools to render the U.S. nuclear arsenal impotent, or to turn the country’s missiles back upon the United States, then we would be unable to act to protect our interests. In this case, we would judge ourselves to be intolerably insecure in cyberspace.”
That could mean “stripping the ‘nice to have’ away from the essential, limiting cyber capabilities in order to minimize cyber vulnerabilities… We can protect ourselves by forcing attackers to cope with system attributes that are outside the reach of computer code,” among other approaches.
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