In January, Donald Trump announced Rudy Giuliani, a man who may or may not even be able to log into his own iTunes account, would play a role in the Trump administration as a cybersecurity advisor:
Giuliani, who heads a cybersecurity consulting firm Giuliani Partners, will serve as an adviser on finding solutions to cyber-incursions in the private sector and to advise the government on possible responses.
Like the rest of Donald Trump’s decision, this seems to be an incompetent selection for such a critical national security role. Top White House officials didn’t even bother to turn up at the top cybersecurity conference in the nation. From Buzzfeed:
The absence of senior administration officials at this year’s conference was particularly noticeable, given the White House’s unclear stance on several key cybersecurity issues, ranging from encryption technology to the way in which foreign states should be punished (or cited) for hacking into the US.
“The government’s retreat from RSA is disappointing. Securing America’s cyber infrastructure was the one campaign promise everyone had hoped that Trump would keep,” said David Cowan, a partner at the venture-capital firm Bessemer Ventures, who attends RSA yearly.
What was the excuse for not sending key personnel to the conference? One attendee believes it is because key roles have not yet been filled by the Trump administration.
Others, including Ed Cabrera, chief cybersecurity officer at Trend Micro, suggested that Trump simply didn’t have the staff in place to send someone to the conference.
“They are still in the process of filing positions… there has been a lot of change in the administration and it’s very early days to send someone to a conference,” said Cabrera, who added that many of the regulars who had attended the conference in past years were political appointees who had resigned at the end of the Obama administration.
Gross incompetence. These aren’t positions to be taken lightly. They are directly related to our national security. Is this what we can expect with Rudy Giuliani acting as an “informal” cybersecurity advisor? Many scoffed at his qualifications at the time. After all, this is a man who blatantly overrode security experts and insisted New York City's emergency command be located at the World Trade Center, one of the top terror targets in the country.
The New York Police Department produced a detailed analysis in 1998 opposing plans by the city to locate its emergency command center at the World Trade Center, but the Giuliani administration overrode those objections. The command center later collapsed from damage in the Sept. 11 terrorist attack.
“Seven World Trade Center is a poor choice for the site of a crucial command center for the top leadership of the City of New York,” a panel of police experts, which was aided by the Secret Service, concluded in a confidential Police Department memorandum.