aNewDomain — Today U.S. President Barack Obama will announce a new executive order concerning cybersecurity. The White House has convened a summit on the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto, CA as part of a renewed push to combat cyber attacks and hackers.Panels will focus on boosting collaboration between private companies and government agencies, improving cybersecurity to protect consumers and better securing payment processing systems.
What will Obama announce?
The executive order is geared towards promoting information sharing in regards to cyber threats. The Christian Science Monitor predicted:
“After years of stressing the need for better cyberthreat intelligence sharing between the private sector and government, President Obama is expected to issue an executive order on Friday directing collaboration.
The action should spell out the ground rules for threat information sharing between businesses and government agencies, and will offer a measure of liability protection for companies that engage in it.”
But not everyone in Silicon Valley is happy with the relations with the government. Bloomberg said:
The top executives of Google Inc., Yahoo! Inc. and Facebook Inc. won’t attend President Barack Obama’s cybersecurity summit on Friday, at a time when relations between the White House and Silicon Valley have frayed over privacy issues.”
Security Versus Encryption
Post-Sony and Post-Edward Snowden trends have come to a head in recent months. Increasingly, privacy advocates and business execs are debating how much sharing should lawfully take place between government, companies and citizens and what protections should be put in place. The aftermath of the late 2014 hacking scandal that hit Sony Pictures, which the US authorities blamed on North Korea, only added fuel to that smoking cyberprivacy fire.
Silicon Valley companies appear to be less concerned about North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, instead focusing their worries on the American intelligence community. CEOs are not sure their protests against NSA methods have been heard in Washington. Nevertheless, spokesmen say the President is confident that sharing information in the fight against hackers needs open collaboration — and that it must happen. He claims he sees the NSA backdoor tactics and methods as another matter, to be discussed with Congress. Observers are skeptical, but we’ll see and keep following this story for you.
Watch the livestream here.
For aNewDomain, I’m David Michaelis.
Cover image:
by Samantha Appleton, White House photographer, via Wikimedia Commons
