Aussie Minister of InfoSec – Not a Bad Idea
The Australians may be on to something, according to the Register’s article about a down under think tank that’s proposing the establishment of a new ministry of “Security and Resilience”. There are certainly some good ideas here for formalizing the management of information technology policy.
Governments are naturally dominated by lawyers and business people. I would agree with those who bemoan the fact that there are so few poets, artists and philosophers in high office, but these walks of life are rarely constitutionally compatible with political temperaments. That seems obvious to me – Václav Havel and a few other exceptions notwithstanding – although I’d be delighted to be proved wrong. On the other hand, public life doesn’t seem so necessarily incompatible with engineering and the sciences. If we have institutions with egghead number crunchers to regulate the economy, we should equally have institutions with capable scientists and engineers with regulatory power concerning matters of technology policy.
The political tendency to oversimplify an issue could surely use a dose of accuracy and precision. Each technical advance increases the dependence of our economy, lifestyle and civilization on technical specialists. The need for such experts in the public sphere can be seen in the patent office, snowed under by filings they can’t grasp; the military, fighting a new cold war with Chinese hackers; in the Fed and the SEC, scratching their heads over Bitcoin; and so on. All of these complex issues demand a sophisticated understanding of nuanced technical alternatives in order to form public policy that balances safety with growth. This is manifestly not forthcoming from the American congress, or any other legislative body. And how could it be given the scarcity of trained and experienced technicians in the corridors of power? I’d suggest a ministry of strategic technology but information security is a good place to start.
