The orange baby’s administration is zeroing out the ability of the US government to compete with the rest of the world — including actual enemies — in cybersecurity. To the extent this is explained at all, it’s attributed to commercial vendors wanting no oversight, and “MAGA loyalists don’t care because they aren’t interested in leadership and governance, they’re interested in scrapping the country for parts and selling it off the back loading dock.”
Those claims seem glib. I’ve worked in “cybersecurity” for quite a while, and commercial organizations absolutely do care about computer and network protection and reliability. They spend a lot on security products, and the companies creating those products rely on US federal agencies for gold-standard guidelines, assistance, information, and expertise. A lot of that was facilitated by the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), which the repubs allowed to expire in September without any replacement.
The question I have is what’s behind this. It could be just stupidity, of course; we’ve seen a lot of that lately. But this seems so unfailingly stupid that I find it a little hard to believe. The alternative, though, is even worse, and more like a conspiracy theory. I just don’t know. As Shakespeare said (in The Tempest): “Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
