Government Needs to Refocus on Cyber Threat, AT&T Executive Says)
Congress should make cybersecurity, not net neutrality, its main communications priority in the year ahead, James Cicconi, AT&T senior executive vice president, told reporters. The Senate Commerce Committee has “a lot of issues involving telecom and the Internet, but there’s probably no more urgent problem than cybersecurity,” he said. “It is real. It is now. It is massive, and the government has not played the role it should have all along.” Although opinions vary on whether Congress should step in on other Internet matters, “there’s nobody I know that doesn’t agree that the government ought to be playing a larger, at least coordinative role, in cybersecurity issues,” he said.
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The U.S. faces a broad set of threats, but “there’s no one area of the federal government that has responsibility,” Cicconi said: “At the same time, everyone is in agreement that the Internet is vital to the American economy. The industry invested $60 billion last year to build out broadband. The government clearly wants it done.” He said attention focused on other issues should be redirected to cybersecurity. “We're spinning our wheels in the Congress and in the industry on issues that in the larger scheme of things are all hypothetical,” he said. “Net neutrality is a debate about a series of hypotheticals. There’s nothing about not neutrality that comes close to cybersecurity in terms of the danger to the Internet.”
Cicconi said he wasn’t “trying to be dismissive” and he understands “there are some real concerns” about net neutrality. Net security, on the other hand “is a very real issue and we don’t have a fraction of the focus in the federal government that advocacy groups are expecting to spend on net neutrality, which is amazing to me.” Cicconi said he wasn’t aiming his criticism at the Obama administration. “If anything, I'm being more critical with the last eight years, and actually beyond that, where cybersecurity issues were really relegated to the defense community and they were not viewed as a challenge to the economy.”
On another broadband issue, Cicconi said carriers will have to limit the use of some applications on wireless networks to protect all users. Skype this week released an application giving iPhone users access to its service. Some observers say this will inevitably raise issues at the FCC about how much network operators like AT&T can limit the bandwidth used by smartphones.
“If it is a shared network, and wireless is, then you have to balance the interests and expectations of the customers,” he said. “Those who assert an unfettered right to do anything they want on the network in some cases carry it too far, in the sense that they seem to feel that their individual right should trump the group rights.” What they're saying is, “'if I want to use an application that prevents everybody in a two-square-mile radius from being able to access the Internet I should have the right to do that’ - and I think that’s wrong,” he said. “We don’t allow that in any aspect of society.”
Cicconi added, “That’s the dilemma, and I think there have to be reasonable limitations on the one customer’s right to do things that damage the rights of all other customers on the same service … I'm not speaking to Skype when I say that or any other particular application, but that’s the core dilemma.”
Cicconi said he expects Rockefeller to take a keen interest in telecom and Internet matters. “He clearly has interest on the issues,” Cicconi said. “He’s been very engaged on most of the major issues throughout his time on the committee … He’s got some incredibly talented staffers to assist him, very bright people. They're politically savvy but also savvy on policy.”
Rockefeller’s cybersecurity legislation is actually two bills sent to different committees, creating a slightly different authority structure for the most controversial provision as described in summaries of the staff working drafts floating around. The first (S-778) would create an Office of the National Cybersecurity Adviser in the White House. It was referred to the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. The second (S-773), referred to Senate Commerce, assigns the authority to disconnect federal and critical infrastructure networks to the president directly. In summaries of staff working drafts this authority was implied to rest with the cybersecurity adviser. The president is given leeway to “declare a cybersecurity emergency and order the limitation or shutdown of Internet traffic” to or from any federal or critical infrastructure network. The president also may order a disconnection “in the interest of national security.” S-773 creates a cybersecurity advisory panel, appointed by the president, to take up matters including whether “societal and civil liberty concerns are adequately addressed” and report every two years on improving U.S. cybersecurity strategy. It also creates a “real-time cybersecurity dashboard,” a system to be developed by the Commerce Department to provide “status and vulnerability information” of all government information systems.