{"id":454,"date":"2009-04-06T20:14:04","date_gmt":"2009-04-07T00:14:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/idblog\/?p=454"},"modified":"2009-04-06T20:37:00","modified_gmt":"2009-04-07T00:37:00","slug":"senate-introduces-cyber-security-czar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/idblog\/2009\/04\/06\/senate-introduces-cyber-security-czar\/","title":{"rendered":"Senate Introduces Cyber-Security &#8220;Czar&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>John Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe, Senate backers of <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/idblog\/2009\/04\/05\/could-obama-close-the-internet\/\">a bill<\/a> which gives the executive branch broad crisis powers over the internet, have separately <a href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/tech-policy\/news\/2009\/04\/sens-introduce-bill-to-federalize-cybersecurity.ars\">introduced legislation<\/a> to create a &#8220;cyber-security czar.&#8221; This new federal position will oversee the many new programs, regulations and crisis planning which the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 lays out in fuller detail. The &#8220;czar&#8221; will require Senate confirmation, but will come with a high security clearance.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not yet clear to me whether the president must give authority to shut down private networks for &#8220;national security&#8221; reasons, or whether, like the Federal Reserve, Obama&#8217;s technology &#8220;czar&#8221; will have broad discretionary power to determine and enact crisis measures. A figure like this may be necessary in an increasingly interconnected web filled with patriotic hackers (ask the Estonians about <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/2\/hi\/europe\/6665195.stm\">Russian DDOS<\/a> attacks), astro-turfers and other digital mercenaries.<\/p>\n<p>Still, while the vagueness of &#8220;national security&#8221; may match the amorphousness of cyber-threats, this is certainly a momentous power shift toward &#8220;federalizing&#8221; the web. I wonder how far down the road some kind of law enforcement censorship regime is. Australia and <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/idblog\/2009\/03\/27\/the-new-censorship-regime-frontier-western-democracies\/\">other Western democracies<\/a> are facing that battle right now, and web freedom advocates are losing in spades.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>John Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe, Senate backers of a bill which gives the executive branch broad crisis powers over the internet, have separately introduced legislation to create a &#8220;cyber-security czar.&#8221; This new federal position will oversee the many new programs, regulations and crisis planning which the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 lays out in fuller detail. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1979,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2097,2142],"tags":[5380,941,3879,5352,3902,3878,399,56359,5379,5381],"class_list":["post-454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-states","category-id-project","tag-attack","tag-australia","tag-cyber","tag-cyber-security","tag-estonia","tag-hacker","tag-national-security","tag-russia","tag-senate","tag-western-democracy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/idblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/idblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/idblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/idblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1979"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/idblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=454"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/idblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/idblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/idblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/idblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}