President Barack Obama hopes to create a new agency to handle potential cyber threats.
“We have to work together like never before,” the president said during a speech at a cybersecurity summit held in Silicon Valley.
The summit consisted of key tech firms and CEOs and presidents of American Express, MasterCard, Visa and Walgreens meeting at Stanford University. However, Senior Google, Yahoo, and Facebook executives turned down invitations to the summit.
According to CNN, the White House cybersecurity summit on the campus of Stanford University, which was meant to unite industry brass with top U.S. law enforcement officials, attracted only one major Silicon Valley CEO: Apple’s Tim Cook, who addressed the gathering shortly before President Obama spoke on Friday.
President Obama insists on the creation of information sharing and analysis organizations (ISAOs) which would help firms and the government share material on potential threats. The White House claims the plan issues the development of a common set of voluntary standards for organizations to use to ensure civil liberties protection.
President Obama stated, “Government cannot do this alone. But the fact is that the private sector can’t do it alone either because it’s government that often has the latest information on new threats.”
According to NBC, the agency will be modeled after the National Counter Terrorism Center, which was established after 9/11 to coordinate terrorism intelligence. The lack of such an agency before led to missed opportunities to thwart the 2001 terrorist attacks.
The American people are still uneasy about their personal information possibly becoming compromised online, but President Obama stands firm, saying the new agency creation will unite firms and the government so that they can better protect the American public. The president wants information to be shared between the federal government and firms, and companies to be more direct in disclosing what occurs when Americans’ personal information is compromised so that the government and firms could prevent sensitive details being stolen by hackers.
According to CNN, the president has signed an executive action with those goals in mind during the summit. The measure creates a framework for companies to share information with each other and the federal government, while still maintaining privacy protections for consumers, according to the White House.
The conference also took place in the aftermath of the hacking scandal that hit Sony Pictures and which the US authorities blamed on North Korea, according to the BBC. Since then, America and China have taken more aggressive stances on cyber security towards each other, and French authorities have increased their security measures in the aftermath of the Paris terror attacks.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/12/politics/obama-apple-cyber-security-san-francisco/
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-31440978
http://www.nbc-2.com/story/28071742/obama-to-create-new-agency-to-examine-cyberthreats
