On Jan. 23rd, 2012, Tabassum Zakaria reported for Reuters on comprehensive cybersecurity legislation. The article explains that Mike McConnel, former director of national intelligence, believes that there will need to be some type of crisis in order for Congress to pass comprehensive cybersecurity legislation. The article quoted McConnel as saying "until we have a banking collapse or electric power goes off . . . we're likely just to talk about it and not do much."
McConnel said a few other interesting things. According to the article, he believes that US intel agencies have "unique capabilities" that could protect American companies from cyber-espionage. These unique capabilities include code-breaking, but McConnel noted that the best code-breakers (the NSA) are currently "powerless to do a thing other than issue a report" within the U.S. private sector.
Two other interesting points, according to McConnel: the US is one of the best in the area of cyber exploitation (i.e. "reading an adversary's mail without leaving fingerprints") and the US has already used its cyber-attack capability.
You can find the Reuters source article here.
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