Presidential Musings on Vital Systems
By: Stephen Collier
From Bloomberg, and with a nod to Adam Leeds for sending this along: Apparently, late at night, when he has time to let his mind wander, our President muses about vulnerable, vital systems.
Separately, Obama, in response to a question on when he finds time in his schedule to sit and reflect, said he tends to be a “night-owl” and typically stays up until midnight after having dinner with his family.
He said sometimes he isn’t dealing with current matters, yet rather, mulling issues “coming down the pike.”
An example, he said, is cyber security.
“There is not a cyber attack right now,” he said. “But that’s a big critical system that is vital to our economy. It’s vital to our public health infrastructure.”
Obama said he is working to “get the wheels turning now” on how to set up systems to protect data while also allowing the government to work with the private sector and not stifle innovation.
May 26th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
On the vulnerability to a cyberattack, you can see my post from April (“Preparing for a Cyber Attack”); it has some interesting leads to those who are interested in the subject. I think it slipped away from attention in the midst of swine flu episode.
Considering one of the strongest reasons for digitization (for instance in the case of energy/electricity grid) is to reduce the economy’s vulnerability in the domain of energy through an increase in energy efficiency, it is interesting that this solution brings with it a new set of problems that does not necessarily fit into the already existing national security paradigms as I have indicated in the above mentioned post.