[liberationtech] Does the White House’s cybersecurity czar need to be a coder? He says no.

[Jack Whitsitt]

Technology has little to nothing to do with the problems being (well, that
should be) worked at a national level...think of cyber security (as a
discipline) as the creation and maintenance of an environment in which
infosec and other *sec's can be most sustainably effective at managing
stakeholder (citizen, business, nation) risk.  An awareness of and even
expertise in the appropriate I/O links and dependencies between Tech and
environment is critical, but most of those links don't require in depth
tech expertise in and of themselves.

I would much rather have a solid abstract thinker who can effectively
decompose the underlying drivers for a problem,  structure them into
solvable components, communicate what needs to be done, and then facilitate
broadly incompatible interests toward common goals in that
position.....than someone who is a coder.  Both have traits in common, but
one understands systems in terms of a scope broader than computers and
let's others with more narrow expertise solve their bits of the problem.

My $0.02 sent from the wilderness -ish
On Aug 25, 2014 10:21 AM, "Richard Brooks" <rrb at g.clemson.edu> wrote:

> Lack of technical expertise is apparently a plus in the world
> of federal cybersecurity:
>
>
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/08/22/does-the-white-houses-cybersecurity-czar-need-to-be-a-coder-he-says-no/
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