National Cybersecurity chief quits, warns of NSA takeover

Rod Beckstrom, the Director of the National Cybersecurity Center resigned less than a year after the office was created as a division of the Department of Homeland Security to coordinate government cybersecurity efforts.

In his resignation letter [View Here] to DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, Beckstrom said he “did not receive appropriate support” from the DHS.

“During the past year the NCSC received only five weeks of funding, due to various roadblocks engineered within the department and by the Office of Management and Budget.”

However, Beckstrom’s resignation letter made clear that the primary reason for his resignation was in reaction to a power-grab by the secretive Department of Defense intelligence service National Security Agency. Beckstrom echoed the concerns of privacy advocates in warning of the dangers of concentrating too much power in a single agency.

“While acknowledging the critical importance of NSA to our intelligence efforts, I believe this is a bad strategy on multiple grounds. The intelligence culture is very different than a network operations of security culture. In addition, the threat to our democratic processes are significant if all top government network security and monitoring are handled by any one organization (either directly of indirectly). During my term as Director we have been unwilling to subjugate the NSCS underneath the NSA.”

Beckstrom’s resignation came fast on the heels of Director of National Intelligence Admiral Dennis Blair’s February 25th  statement to the House Intellgence Committee . Blair said that the NSA, which oversaw the Bush Administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, should be in charge of cybersecurity rather than the DHS.

Blair’s views are not without their supporters among President Obama’s advisers. Paul Kurtz, who led the President’s transition team cybersecurity group told Forbes in an interview that the NSA, “needs to be a part of the program despite its controversial reputation.” Kurtz further favors modeling national cybersecurity management on counter-terrorism efforts.

Beckstrom and Kurtz represent two competing visions of what the NCSC’s job should be. Whether the NCSC will adopt Beckstrom’s economics and game theory driven securty model or a more authoritarian one informed by law enforcement and signals intelligence culture is likely dependent on Melissa Hathaway. Hathaway, a senior director at the National Security Council, was tasked by President Obama on February 9th to head up a sixty day review of all Federal cybersecurity systems and is expected to be the top candidate to replace Beckstrom.

Related

View Rod Beckstrom’s 2008 Black Hat security conference presentation. [Quicktime]

Purchase Rod Beckstrom’s book The Starfish And The Spider, co-authored with Ori Brafman.