BBC: Obama begins cyber security review

Full story here.

A review of how well the US thwarts spies and malicious hackers has been started by President Barack Obama.

The wide-ranging review is set to last 60 days and takes in all the “plans, programs and activities” of official US cyber security efforts.

The end result will be a strategy to improve the way the US defends itself against net-borne threats. While campaigning, President Obama likened net risks to the threat of nuclear or biological attack.

National security

“The national security and economic health of the United States depend on the security, stability, and integrity of our nation’s cyberspace, both in the public and private sectors,” said John Brennan, assistant to the president for counterterrorism and homeland security, in a statement….

The BBC reporter notes that the Commission on Cybersecurity (CSIS) previously produced a report entitled Securing Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency in December 2008.

What would a strategy for securing cyberspace look like? Recall John Bumgarner’s recent talk at the Fletcher School, entitled Policy Voides of Cyber Conflicts, February 3, 2009. At present, there are too many competing civilian and military agencies for the country to have a cohesive policy, and no clear definition of what securing cyberspace would entail. Preparing for war? Stamping out credit fraud? Hardening the nation’s civilian infrastructure? Mandating national quality standards for computer programming? None of these definitions fits the bill. I’ll be very interested to see what Obama’s team comes up with.

Best political map of the election

Mark Newman’s election maps reinforce just how hard it is to come up with anything new. I was thinking to myself on election night that the maps we have are nearly useless for helping people understand how the election is going. Instead of geographic area, the sizes of the states ought to reflect their electoral weight. Of course, Newman has been doing this since 2004.

We can correct for this by making use of a cartogram, a map in which the sizes of states are rescaled according to their population. That is, states are drawn with size proportional not to their acreage but to the number of their inhabitants, states with more people appearing larger than states with fewer, regardless of their actual area on the ground. On such a map, for example, the state of Rhode Island, with its 1.1 million inhabitants, would appear about twice the size of Wyoming, which has half a million, even though Wyoming has 60 times the acreage of Rhode Island.

Mark Newman's 2008 Electiooral Vote Cartogram