It took seven months to fill the job, but Obama’s cybersecurity coordinator says he’s off and running. Howard Schmidt says he has a big agenda in front of him to revamp national cybersecurity, but he says he has the president’s full support.
Schmidt laid out his goals for the coming months, which include intense coordination with the private sector. eSecurity Planet has the details on Schmidt’s plans.
WASHINGTON — Barely one month into the job, Howard Schmidt is getting an idea of just how big a task he has ahead of him.
Schmidt, whom President Obama tapped late last year to serve as the administration’s senior director for cybersecurity, today laid out an ambitious agenda for revamping the government’s approach to shoring up the country’s digital infrastructure.
For the seven months that the position remained unfilled, observers opined about the difficulty the individual selected would encounter in trying to bring together the various federal agencies, Congress and the military to develop a coherent cybersecurity strategy.
But Schmidt, a former top executive at Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) who has also headed up cybersecurity under the Bush administration, made it plain today that he has the mandate to do the job.
“The president’s been very, very clear in designating me as his lead policy official in cyberspace security in the federal government,” Schmidt said in a speech here at the State of the Net conference, an annual tech policy event hosted by the Congressional Internet Caucus.
