Making a single federal agency responsible for cybersecurity, which has been proposed in a bipartisan Senate bill, has been thumbed down by Attorney General Janet Reno.
"You've got different issues, " Reno says, "and to centralize it, in terms of protection, ignores the different functions of the different parts of government and the different situations that are involved."
Reno didn't address it directly, but Senate Governmental Affairs Committee chairman Fred Thompson (R-TN) and the ranking committee Democrat, Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, had said Feb. 23 they'd hold hearings March 2 on the bill they introduced last year to centralize oversight on cybersecurity in the government within the Office of Management and Budget.
The attorney general spoke at her weekly news briefing Feb. 25, saying warding off cyberenemies is more of a matter of chips and circuits. "It is not just a matter of centralizing a particular function in a particular office, it is a matter of developing the technology to protect the technology, but to do so consistent with our constitutional rights," Reno says.
"You can't tell where an attack is coming from," she says. "Rather than addressing the issues of who [might attack], I think we've all got to understand that we are vulnerable, and that if we are going to use this new technology so that it really achieves the dream we have for it ... this world is going to have to work together to ensure protection of that system."
APBNews says Reno is still smarting from widespread criticism over progress in federal probes of this month's spam-bomb denial-of-service attacks that jammed some of the Internet's biggest sites. She says technology's pace is quicker than law enforcement's capability to probe cybercrime.
"We need the equipment, we need the expertise," Reno says. "We need cooperation from foreign governments to be able to trace these attacks. We need to cooperate with foreign governments to protect their infrastructure. We've got to design a system that, in order to use it around the world, is secure."
But she agrees with Thompson and Lieberman, APBNews says, that the U.S. might be ill-equipped to ward off serious future attacks by foreign powers which might commit what Lieberman calls "asymmetrical warfare" against American infrastructure - including telecommunications. Reno says the government must be more diligent in protecting information.
