Hathaway: A Lamp To Lead US
I’m still catching up with recent cybersecurity publications that have been cluttering up my desk(top) for the last couple of weeks. Next on the pile is Melissa Hathaway’s piece for Harvard’s Belfer Center, Strategic Advantage: Why America Should Care About Cybersecurity.
Hathaway presents a simple answer to why America should care: it’s all about the bottom line. There are too many quotes to pull from the paper that emphasise this point to the exclusion of almost any other; there is a short discursion on power grids but that rapidly degenerates into talk of economics and competitive advantage. I’m not saying these are not important – they are; how else is the private sector going to be enticed to collaborate effectively with government? – but I’d have thought there was more to the story than this.
Having said that, at least Hathaway doesn’t dive down the rabbit-hole of cybergeddon craziness. Her piece is essentially a personal plea for co-operation and that has to be a good thing. As the principal architect of the US Cyberspace Policy Review it’s hardly surprising it reads like the Review and re-states its essential policy proposals. Like the Review, there’s little concrete to report.
It’s a strange paper though. Hathaway deploys the Wei-Ch’i (Go) metaphor with little success and resorts to scripture towards the end of her piece:
There is a verse in the Book of Psalms that says ‘your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path’. The promise in that verse is that we are given enough information, knowledge, or wisdom to take the next step. While it may make us more comfortable to have a set of high beam halogen headlights that illuminate the next two miles of the road, all we have is a lamp that lights the next few steps of our path.
And so on:
Whether it is a lighthouse on the shore, a lamp along the path, a candle in the night, or a flashlight in our hands, we must all be working together to light and walk this path.
Oh crap. Even Obama didn’t go this far in his speech that launched the Review in the first place. File under ‘polemic’.
