General Hayden - Words of Wisdom

I was privileged to listen to one of my all-time favorite presentations by retired General Michael Hayden, former director of NSA and CIA. The venue: TTI / Vanguard Conference on CyberInsecurity in Washington DC. He was reflecting on the current "bogey man" known as Cyber security. 

Now to most of us, Cyber space is a Hollywood (sci-fi genre) conjured term used synonymously with the Internet. It's origins are actually from a 1984 novel called Neuromancer.  In the National Security discourse the term cyber-space is the "5th domain" with implications far removed from a Hollywood set. There is complex language of "mutually assured dependence" and Cyber warfare. Why the 5th domain? Well the other four are: land, sea, air and space. General Hayden artfully distringuished cyber-space as the only domain that was created by man, the rest of which was "created by god" - and natural events. Adding: "we did not do such a good job". Simply-put the Internet is inherently untrusted, and was designed for anonimyity and information movement. Not for security.

In the US we are still grappling with the ownership of the "cyber thing" which Hayden points out is very much fractured. There are voices that seek to frame the problem as a matter of commerce to be shepherded along led with the private sector. On the other, cyber is a matter of national security with bills that promote a nation navigating both times of cyber peace .. and war. Clearly its not a trivial topic. The private sector owns a lot of critical infrastructure from our energy supplies, power grids and financial markets. And the networks and systems are not entirely isolated from this thing called cyber-space. For ill-doers this is a prize. 


The Internet was designed and engineered for friend not foe.


The growing voices that suggest cyber space should be regulated and done so by government, immediately starts to run chills down the spine of civil libertarians and privacy mavens. They fear as Hayden put it: that the US government will make the dubious offer that it cannot protect its citizens unless, it is allowed to monitor them on the Internet. A fear reinforced when General Hayden gave a wink to his own prior employers (NSA) "abridged sense of privacy".


His message was one of a sense of urgency and not alarmist. He encouraged industry to spend energy into thinking about security and privacy and not just the ease of use of the Internet. And the need for doctrine about what can and should not happen in cyber space. (think about the lack of norms against a a cyber attack on a hospital's patient management system).

As John Negroponte put it (also a presenter) in cyber space "proceed with caution"