Beckstrom Quits the National Cyber Security Center
After about a year of being underfunded and frustrated by government bureaucracies, Rod Beckstrom has quit the National Cyber Security Center, a secret organization that was supposed to do what US-CERT couldn’t: secure the federal government against hackers.
The NCSC consisted of just 5 people: Rod Beckstrom, his deputy Mary Ellen Seale, and one other guy who probably made the coffee and wrote the concept of operations, one of just a few tangible goals acheived by the group in the past year. There are also two guys on loan from other organizations called “detailees” but they were there to protect the interests of the organizations who sent them there. Beckstrom’s full resignation letter can be found here.
From the WSJ here:
The government’s coordinator for cybersecurity programs has quit, criticizing what he described as the National Security Agency’s grip on cybersecurity.
Rod Beckstrom, a former Silicon Valley entrepreneur, said in his resignation letter that the NSA’s central role in cybersecurity is “a bad strategy” because it is important to have a civilian agency taking a key role in the issue.
Mr. Beckstrom’s National Cybersecurity Center, created last March to coordinate all government cybersecurity efforts, answered to the secretary of homeland security.
Some Homeland Security officials said Mr. Beckstrom’s criticism stemmed from personality clashes and an inability to adapt to the way business is done in Washington.
In his letter, Mr. Beckstrom said his office was funded for just five weeks out of the past year and had just five people working in it. During the rest of the period, he borrowed staff and office space from other agencies.
Yeah, civilians who take jobs in the Federal government are often confronted with the “way business is done in Washington.” The way business is done is to take funding, produce no measurable output, and don’t get fired. Any attempts to actually do the job you are supposed to do is met with derision, roadblocks and threats. I previously wrote about the NCSC here. Thanks again to Steinnon for his thoughts on his Threat Chaos blog about this.
