All Blog Posts from Political Hotsheet

The U.S. president has announced a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy for the federal government, saying Internet-based threats have risen "dramatically" and the country "must act to reduce our vulnerabilities."

A 76-page White House document calls for a new way of looking at Internet and computer security, saying that private-public partnerships are necessary, collaboration with international organizations will be vital, and that privacy and civil liberties must be respected in the process.

Sound familiar? The year was 2003, and the president was George W. Bush, who wrote the introduction to what he called a "National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace."

On Friday, President Obama announced his 76-page "Cyberspace Policy Review" -- with precisely the same number of pages as his predecessor's -- at an event at the White House.

While the Bush document discusses centralizing cybersecurity responsibilities in the Department of Homeland Security and the Obama document shifts them to the White House, the two reports are remarkably similar. Perhaps this should be no surprise: Obama selected Melissa Hathaway, who worked for the director of national intelligence in the Bush administration and was director of an Bush-era "Cyber Task Force," to conduct the review.

To test your political acumen, we've taken excerpts from both and placed them side-by side in the following chart. Can you tell which quotations come from which administration? (An answer key is at the end.)

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President Obama on Friday said the United States government is "not as prepared" as it should be to respond to disruptions caused by computer or Internet attacks and announced that a new cybersecurity coordinator position would be created inside the White House staff.

The still-to-be-named coordinator will oversee a new bureaucracy tasked with digital infrastructure protection, which had previously been handled by the Department of Homeland Security. "We will ensure that these networks are secure, trustworthy and resilient," Mr. Obama said. We will deter, prevent, detect, and defend against attacks and recover quickly from any disruptions or damage."

Obama's announcement, which was expected, came as the president released the outcome of a 60-day review that sought to rethink how the federal government should address cybersecurity. Business groups had sought to raise cybersecurity's profile in the administration but remained wary about regulatory mandates from Washington; security hawks would prefer the new bureaucracy to have more authority over the private sector.

The final report represents a political compromise. It suggests "intrusion detection and prevention systems" and "warning of cyber intrusions and attacks," while stressing that collaboration with privacy groups and industry is vital. New laws compelling companies to share more information with the federal government about intrusions may be necessary, it says, but only "as a last resort."

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President Obama on Friday is expected to unveil his administration's plans to deal with cybersecurity threats to federal agencies and the private sector, including the creation of a White House "cyber czar."

It's not yet clear who that person will be, or even whether Mr. Obama will name someone during his announcement. The new position is expected to be folded into, as part of a political compromise, both the National Security Council and National Economic Council.

The announcement, which will take place at 10:55 a.m. ET in the White House's East Room, caps years of criticism of the Department of Homeland Security's efforts and months of speculation about what form the replacement cybersecurity bureaucracy will take.

"It provides the president with recommendations for a White House organizational structure that can effectively address cyberspace-related issues," Melissa Hathaway, acting cyberspace director for the White House's National Security and Homeland Security councils, said recently.

No bureaucratic mandate will satisfy everyone: Security hawks would like the "czar" to have authority -- which may mean new laws -- to direct both federal agencies and private businesses on cybersecurity matters. Business representatives, on the other hand, like the potential for increased high-level attention but remain wary of mandates from Washington.

In February, Mr. Obama ordered a 60-day review of the federal government's cybersecurity efforts, and appointed Hathaway -- who had worked for the director of national intelligence in the Bush administration -- to lead it. Two months later, Hathaway announced the report had been submitted to the president along with recommendations; it's expected to be made public on Friday.

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Although Memorial Day is meant to honor all American fallen soldiers, one man took it upon himself to honor the most recent soldiers who died in action.

Google engineeer Sean Askay, with research and the help of the Google Earth team, created “Map of the Fallen,” which pinpoints the locations where the 5,700 American and coalition force soldiers died in Iraq and Afghanistan. The interactive map (which requires Google Earth 5.0) also traces the lines connecting each of the fallen soldiers to their hometown and can be viewed chronologically, starting with the first death in Afghanistan of a U.S. soldier on Oct. 10, 2001.

In addition, Map of the Fallen is searchable by name, gender, age, hometown, or location of death, and includes photos of the soldiers, information on how they died, a guest book for visitors and links to memorial sites and obituaries.

WASHINGTON--The Conficker Internet virus has infected important computerized medical devices, but governmental red tape interfered with their repair, an organizer of an anti-virus working group told Congress on Friday.

Rodney Joffe, one of the founders of an unofficial organization known as the Conficker Working Group, said that government regulations prevented hospital staff from carrying out the repairs.

Joffe, who also is the senior vice president for the telecom clearinghouse Neustar, told a panel of the House Energy and Commerce Committee that over the last three weeks, he and another Conficker researcher identified at least 300 critical medical devices from a single manufacturer that have been infected with the computer virus.

The devices were used in hospitals to allow doctors to view and manipulate high-intensity scans like MRIs and were often found in or near intensive care unit facilities, connected to local area networks with other critical medical devices.

"They should have never, ever been connected to the Internet," Joffe said.

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A White House "virtual town hall" that Barack Obama hosted last month was intended to be an exercise in open-microphone democracy that would allow the president to interact with average Americans.

Aides billed it as permitting members of the public to "pose a question or vote for a particular question" using the Google Moderator utility. A new area of the WhiteHouse.gov Web site was titled Open For Questions, and nearly 1.8 million votes were cast.

That was the plan. After voting began, though, a committed group of mischievous activists (and their friends) deluged WhiteHouse.gov with their votes -- and questions advocating the legalization of marijuana soon topped the site's "green jobs," "financial stability," "jobs," and "budget" categories. Obama eventually told the live audience that he doesn't think pot legalization is "a good strategy to grow our economy."

The White House's experience with reefer madness reflects the challenges that Mr. Obama faces when living up to his campaign pledge to create a "new level of transparency" through "cutting-edge technologies."

At 100 days into the Obama administration, Washington observers said that the president has made some significant steps toward using technology and the Internet to honor that campaign promise. In other ways, they said, Mr. Obama has not yet lived up to it.

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The federal official overseeing a 60-day review of the U.S. government's cybersecurity efforts indicated on Wednesday that the final report recommended shifting more responsibilities to the White House.

"It provides the president with recommendations for a White House organizational structure that can effectively address cyberspace-related issues," Melissa Hathaway, acting cyberspace director for the White House's National Security and Homeland Security councils, said at the RSA computer security conference in San Francisco.

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Vice President Joe Biden lauded Hollywood at a gala dinner in Washington on Tuesday evening, assailed movie piracy, and promised film executives that the Obama administration would pick "the right person" as its copyright czar.

Just days after four Pirate Bay defendants were found guilty in Sweden, Biden warned of the harms of piracy at a private event organized by the Motion Picture Association of America in the sumptuous, newly renovated Great Hall of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

"It's pure theft, stolen from the artists and quite frankly from the American people as consequence of loss of jobs and as a consequence of loss of income," Biden said, according to a White House pool report.

Biden blasted China, saying its intellectual property laws remain "largely ineffective" and will end up "strangling their own creative juices," and compared it to what he described as India's more effective anti-piracy regime. He singled out Canada, a close U.S. ally, as needing stronger laws; it never signed the treaty that led to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and a proposal to adopt anti-circumvention restrictions was never adopted.

He also addressed President Obama's forthcoming decision about who will be named the intellectual-property enforcement coordinator, better known as the copyright czar. Copyright industry lobbyists sent a letter Monday to the president asking him to pick someone sympathetic to their concerns, while groups that would curb copyright law sent their own letter urging the opposite approach.

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Cyberattacks are on the rise: the Defense Department said this week that computer spies stole documents related to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, and the Conficker worm has infected millions of computers.

Ever since its creation by an act of Congress in 2002, the Department of Homeland Security has been the lead federal agency responsible for cybersecurity. But after DHS received failing grades from government auditors, some Washington insiders have questioned whether another federal agency — perhaps the shadowy National Security Agency — would be better suited to the task.

On Tuesday, the director of the NSA downplayed reports that the intelligence agency had attempted to wrest control of cybersecurity responsibilities.

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Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), whose bid for the GOP presidential nomination last year electrified libertarians and generated a passionate following online, told Bob Schieffer that he will "probably" not run for president in 2012 during a special "Washington Unplugged" interview.

In a free-flowing conversation, Paul was pessimistic about both the direction of his party and the country.

Asked about the future of the GOP, Paul said: "I think of it in terms of the country and the future of the Republican and Democratic party, and there's not much good in either party at the rate we're going, and right now I think in the near future the Republican Party has a long way to go to build their credibility up again."

Paul was similarly downbeat about the Democratic leadership.

"The Democrats aren’t doing any better than the Republicans," said Paul. "I mean they're spending more, they're printing more and they're doing exactly the wrong thing as well, so eventually they're going to get blamed."

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