Presidential hopeful Jeb Bush said during Thursday night’s Republican Party debate that he favors putting the National Security Agency in charge of the country’s cybersecurity needs following a series of of high-profile hacks that successfully targeted government agencies and corporations alike under the current administration.
The former governor of Florida said near the end of Thursday evening’s event that the next president must work better with Silicon Valley to ensure that the tech sector and federal government are on the same page with regards to deterring and defeating any further cyberattacks.
In the wake of the Office of Personnel Management breach last year that allowed hackers to compromise the sensitive files of millions of government employees and contractors, Mr. Bush said that the Obama administration has “failed us completely,” and that the next president must reassess how to go about protecting the nation’s public computer networks with the help of the private sector.
“The problem today is there’s no confidence in Washington, D.C. There needs to be more than one meeting, there needs to complete dialogue with the large technology companies. They understand that there’s a national security risk. We ought to give them a little bit of a liability release so that they share data amongst themselves and share data with the federal government, they’re not fearful of a lawsuit,” said Mr. Bush.
“We need to make sure that we keep the country safe. This is the first priority. The cybersecurity challenges that we face, this administration failed us completely, completely. Not just the hacking of OPM, but that is — that is just shameful. 23 million files in the hands of the Chinese? So it’s not just the government — the private sector companies, it’s also our own government that needs to raise the level of our game,” the presidential hopeful added.
To accomplish as much, Mr. Bush proposed shifting responsibility to the NSA, the same agency currently tasked with signals intelligence gathering and other electronic eavesdropping efforts undertaken for the sake of national security.
“We should put the NSA in charge of the civilian side of this as well. That expertise needs to spread all across the government and there needs to be much more cooperation with our private sector,” said Mr. Bush.
But following revelations concerning the scope of the NSA’s vast surveillance operations, as disclosed by Edward Snowden, a former contractor, members of Congress have begun reining in the agency’s capabilities, and last year adopted the USA Freedom Act, in turn ending the NSA’s practice of collecting in bulk the call records of millions of Americans on a daily basis.
Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor also vying for the GOP’s nod, said during Thursday that passage of the USA Freedom Act was “a bad decision” and that the intelligence community should be given “the funding and the tools that it needs to be able to keep America safe.”
Congress, meanwhile, passed the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, or CISA, last year, in turn adopting legislation in which private companies are indeed granted liability protection in the event that they voluntarily provide government investigators with computer records concerning any attempted cyberattacks on their networks, as suggested by Mr. Bush during Thursday’s debate.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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