Amit Yoran, Cybersecurity Czar for DHS

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

THE INSIDE SCOOP OF THE MOST POWERFUL MAN IN CYBERSPACE

Amit Yoran, The New Cybersecurity Tsar For Homeland Security - Who Is This Man Who Will Be Watching Everything We Do Online, And Can He Be Trusted?

by Samuel A. Stanson

SEPTEMBER 20, 2003 - When you first hear the name Amit Yoran as the person who has just been charged with overseeing cybersecurity  - keeping an eye on everything that goes on online - for America's Department of Homeland Security, it sounds odd. One would not normally expect to hear a foreign-sounding name for such an important national security position.

Yoran has always been a bit of an oddball.  While some children have role models like John Wayne or Babe Ruth, Amit's most envied role model was Alex P. Keaton, the character Michael J. Fox played on the NBC TV sitcom Family Ties.  People who know him say he used to wear vests and even ties to school when he was growing up - and he did not attend a private school where uniforms were required.  No, this was just the way Amit used to like to dress, even amidst a mix other kids wearing everything from Metallica shirts to the latest Benetton fashions.  And he would - like the Keaton character on the show - frequently gush about, "What a stud," Ronald Reagan or Oliver North were.

And this was back in his high school days.

So does that mean that the man who will run our cybersecurity program and watch over everything we do online is some psychotic right-winger who we should fear?

Well, to understand this man you need to look at his roots.

Born into a life of relative privilege, Amit was one of four sons of Israeli immigrants.  As people from Israel like to say, you mature very quickly there, and paying attention to world affairs is not something that makes a kid a dork or egghead, it is simply a fact of existence there.  And so Amit's focus at a young age on international affairs and embrace of the boldly pro-Israel foreign policy of the Reagan administration is easily understood.  And, as someone descended from a nation whose existence is threatened on a daily basis, the importance these things played in even his early life begins to not seem so odd after all.

Yoran's focus propelled him.  Although he was smart, he was in no way one of the smartest children in his class.  While you would expect a would-be computer geek to be a braniac lost in his own world of algorithms and programming languages, Amit was much more interested in a mix of Casper Weinberger and beer, and actually struggled in his advanced mathematical studies.  Yes, he was already acting more like a military man than a true computer nerd.

And so it is not surprising that while other kids in his extremely wealthy, Ivy League-worshiping hometown of Pound Ridge, New York dreamed of going to Harvard or Yale, Amit was focused on a much more serious goal - to attend West Point, as his brother, Elad, had before him.

How many computer geeks do you know whose dream is to join the military?  One can easily start to get the image of Yoran as someone who is a bit off-kilter and war happy.

However, in reality, Amit didn't prove so gun happy after all.  When the government offered to forgo his contract to serve militarily after his graduation from West Point so he could serve as a cryptology specialist, he gladly put down his rifle and headed to Washington.  There, he began to make a name for himself and a network of contacts which he would greatly use to his advantage a few years down the road when he decided to start his own business.  Riptech, the cybersecurity firm Amit started with his West Point brother Elad - thanks to his connections in government circles in part - took off like an Tomahawk missile, and after only 4 years of running the company, they were bought out by Symantec for $145 million.

Not a bad payoff for a few years work.

So, is this man, who will be charged with watching over all of us, yet another Bush-brand Republican with no respect for honesty, who used, like the President, inside connections to get ahead in life?

The answer is:  a resounding no.  Amit is nothing like your typical Bushie.  In fact, Amit might be dubbed the anti-Bush.

Just compare their histories for starters.

Both were born to a life of privilege, but while Bush chose to party and had no interest - until even just a couple of years ago - in foreign policy, Amit never had an interest in things like drugs and was focused from early on on foreign affairs.

While President Bush chose the typical rich boy Ivy League route by going to Yale, Amit chose to serve his country by going to West Point.

While President Bush did as much as possible to avoid having to serve in the military - fleeing to the Texas Air National Guard, and even fleeing AWOL from there - Amit fought to overcome scholastic and physical challenges to fight his way into West Point.

While George Bush was handed businesses by his daddy's friends and one by one ran them into the ground, Amit started a company on his own and quickly grew it into a massive success.

And while President Bush is a newcomer to "conservative" values and political ideas, only coming to them after 40-plus years of being an unambitious, uninterested alcoholic - and even then only embracing the dishonest, fully-flawed Rush Limbaugh version of conservatism - Amit has always been a moderate socially and conservative politically, and his conservative politics are based on solid ideals and a belief in certain policies that has been borne over years of active consideration and experience.

So in the end the question is not, "Will Amit Yoran make a good chief of cybersecurity for the Department of Homeland Security?"  He will, and, not being a Bush-brand Republican but a true, morally sound moderate, he can be trusted not to abuse his position or attack in the way the hateful, paranoid Ashcroft does.

No, in the end, the question becomes why is it that George W. Bush is our President and not a thoughtful, intelligent, accomplished, militarily trained and educated man like Amit Yoran?

Oh yeah, maybe that's because he is only 32 years old, while to be President you have to be at least 40.

Amit Yoran was not President Bush's first choice for the position of Cyber Tsar.  One man has already resigned from the position and another refused the President's offer to be his replacement.  No, Amit wasn't the first choice, and he wasn't even the second.  But, in reality, he was likely the best choice.

He won't bring rhetoric and hate to the office, but drive and capability.  Unfortunately for the President, who maybe was just trying to appoint another toe-the-line-while-destroying-freedom political hack, he ended up with the real deal.  If he was hoping for another heel-biting Bush/Limbaughian - a Hannity-like head to kiss his butt and fill a space - he screwed up.

No, President Bush did not inflict the nation with an amoral, dishonest, America-hating Cyber Tsar born in the mold of President Bush and his born-again Republican friends.  In fact, unwittingly, the President just may have given a big step up to a man who may someday shake the Bush stranglehold on Republican politics and go on to become the Commander-In-Chief President Bush can only dream of being.

http://www.moderateindependent.com/v1i11yoran.htm

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

hairman and CEO of NetWitness, Amit Yoran, gave testimony yesterday to the House Committee on Homeland Security regarding the Review of the Federal Cyberspace Mission.  The House Committee wanted Mr. Yoran's input based on his leadership in cyber security in the private and Federal space and his experiences as the first Director of the National Cyber Security Division (NCSD) and standing up the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) and Einstein program at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and as founder and CEO of Riptech.

Below is his five-minute summary to the Committee.

    Ms. Chairwoman and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify before the Homeland Security Committee on Reviewing the Federal Cybersecurity Mission and for your attention to this important topic.

    My name is Amit Yoran and I have a lot to say, so I'll skip reading you my bio and jump into it.

    Any effective national cyber effort must leverage the intelligence community's superior technical acumen and scalability.  However, it is in grave peril if this effort is dominated by the intelligence community.  Simply put, the intelligence community has always and will always prioritize its own collection efforts over the defense and protection of our government's and nation's digital systems.  Where intelligence operations discover a compromise, the decision to inform system defenders or not, lacks transparency.  Mission conflict exists between those defending systems and those attempting to collect intelligence or counter intelligence insights.

    The current series of cyber programs call for billions of dollars in funding for intelligence and centralized security efforts but are designed with very little emphasis on helping defenders better protect the systems housing our valuable data and business processes.  For instance the Center for Disease Control, which houses sensitive research and information about biological threats such as Anthrax, has ongoing cyber incidents which it lacks the personnel and technologies to adequately investigate,  In the face of spending billions more on centralized cyber intelligence activities, the CDC's cyber budget is being cut by 37%.

    Intelligence focused, our national cyber efforts are over-classified to the point where catastrophic consequences are highly probable.  High levels of classification prevent the sharing of information necessary to adequately defend systems.  For instance, IP addresses, when classified cannot be loaded into defensive monitoring systems.  It also creates insurmountable hurdles when working with a broad range of government IT staffs that do not have appropriate clearances, let alone when trying to communicate or partner with the private sector.

    Classification cannot be used effectively as a cyber defensive technique, only one for avoiding responsibility and accountability. Over-classification leads to a narrowly limited review of any program.  One of the hard learned lessons from the Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP) is that such limited review can lead to ineffective legal vetting of a program.  The cyber mission cannot be plagued by the same flaws as the TSP.

    An immediate, thorough and transparent legal analysis of the governance, authorities, and privacy requirements should be performed on both the efforts used to protect IT systems as well as all cyber collection activities.  Given the broad concerns of over-classification and its cascading consequences, conducting these reviews must be a high priority task.

    Cyber research investments are practically nonexistent at a time when bold new visions need to be explored.

    The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has demonstrated inefficiency and leadership failure in its cyber efforts.  While pockets of progress have been made, administrative incompetence and political infighting have squandered meaningful advancement and for years now, while our adversaries continue to aggressively press their advantage. DHS has repeated failed to either attract or retain the leadership and technical acumen required to successfully lead the cyber mission.  While the tendency would be to move the cyber mission to the NSA, it is ill advised for all of the reasons provided in my much longer written testimony.  We must enable civil government to succeed at its defensive mission or also concede that the private sector must be subjugated to intelligence support.

    DHS is the natural and appropriate placement for public private partnership and cooperative activities, including those in cyber.  The current set of public private partnerships is at best ill defined.  They categorically suffer from meaningful value creation or private sector incentive.

    Such incentives might include tax credits, fines, liability levers, public recognition, or even occur at an operational level, through mechanisms such as the sharing of threat intelligence, technical knowledge or incident response support to name just a few.

    Trust relationships when dealing in cyber security matters are critical.  In discussions among privacy and civil liberties groups the role of the NSA in monitoring or defending US networks is debated.  Should such intelligence programs exist, DHS should be very careful before participation in, supporting  or engagement in these activities.   The department's ability to fulfill its primary mission and responsibilities may be permanently damaged by a loss of public confidence and trust.

    At a bare minimum, in order to preserve public trust, any interaction with domestic intelligence collection efforts should be explicitly and clearly articulated.  Such transparency will increase public trust and confidence and offset concerns raised by uncertainty and the uninformed.

    DHS must be formally charged with and enabled to build an effective cyber capability in support of securing federal civilian systems.

    Special provisions should be made in the hiring, contracting, human resources and political issues within the cyber mission of DHS to prevent it from remaining a victim of the department's broader administrative failures.

    DHS should also be given specific emergency authorities to address security concerns in civil systems, to include the ability to measure compliance with security standards, protocols and practices and take decisive action where organizations are not applying reasonable standards of care.

    At present the operations cybersecurity arm of DHS, the US-CERT, remains politically torn apart into three components and completely subjugated to a cadre of detailees from the intelligence community.  In order to regain efficiency, the department's operational security role activites must be reconsolidated in the US-CERT.  This operational mission is not resourced to succeed with less than 20 government FTEs, and a budget of only $67 million.  Additionally, the US-CERT must be led by a single federal civil executive.

    The US-CERT must be provided appropriate staffing levels to move forward and given adequate funding.  Not doing so cannot help but send the strongest message to the cyber community, the rest of government, the intelligence community and the critical infrastructure in the private sector that cybersecurity does not matter to DHS leadership and should not matter to them.

    A newly focused US-CERT should report directly to the Secretary of DHS, just as NTOC reports to the Director of the NSA.  The cyber responsibilities of the department must not remain buried in the bureaucracy of DHS or, alternatively, they must be removed and placed in an independent agency where they can succeed.

Amit Yoran's full written testimony is available for download from the Committee website here.

http://www.netwitness.com/blog/index.ph ... -congress/