How sharing data 'advances privacy'

Published: 27 Feb 2004 11:35 GMT

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Senator Bob Bennett received the RSA Award for Excellence in the Field of Public Policy at the RSA Conference this week.

It was not a random honorific: Bennett, the chief deputy majority whip and a member of the Senate Republican leadership team, has been especially active when it comes to high-tech issues.

The Utah Republican was chairman of the special committee responsible for the relatively glitch-free Year 2000 computer switch and for the Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) Working Group, the Senate's central clearing house for cybersafety and CIP issues.

Bennett also sponsored the Critical Infrastructure Information Security Act of 2001. We caught up with Bennett at the RSA Conference to discuss his views on cybersecurity and the outlook for legislative action this year on cyberissues.

What kind of progress has the government made in defending critical infrastructure from cyberattacks?
We are trying to improve our ability to deal with cyberthreats, but 9/11 obviously changed the focus. Congress is understandably more focused on preventing kinetic attacks, as opposed to cyberattacks. But we will deal with cyberattacks. Al-Qaida is much crippled from where they were, but we fear that another attack could occur. That's something we could get a handle on.

How do you get a handle on preventing further attacks?
An attack has to be organised, and there is always an intelligence opportunity that occurs. Particularly since 9/11, we are focused far more on intelligence gathering. A terrorist war is an intelligence war; it's not two armies massed in the field to clash with each other. We are monitoring known al-Qaida cells, and the breaking up of Iraq and capturing Saddam Hussein has given us a rich trove of intelligence.

We are getting information out of Iran and other places that have sheltered terrorists, as well as diplomatically from other countries' intelligence services. You monitor the chatter between al-Qaida cells and between terrorist groups. That's why we do an orange alert -- partly because the chatter is telling us they are planning something and partly to send a message to them: we are listening and know your chatter level is higher than it was.

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