White House has been adamant about devising measures to ensure its own notions of cyber security somehow. A draft of an earlier executive order was issued, but it couldn’t gather around the required support. Now, the White House has issued a new draft which doesn’t seem to differ from the earlier version.
The content of the new executive order focuses on enhancing the mutual collaboration of multiple governmental agencies on matters of digital security and make data sharing among them more easy and convenient.
At the same time, the draft aims to somehow entice such private companies which are ‘owners and operators of critical infrastructure’ to be a part of the whole ‘Enhanced Cybersecurity Initiative.’ Government has long tried to woo these companies precisely because it thinks access to their user data is pertinent to make digital security fool-proof.
Companies, on the other hand, haven’t been much excited at the prospect since it would essentially entail sharing the user’s personal and private data with the government, often under shady legal clauses. Those who agree to participate in it will be provided certain ‘incentives.’
In other words, if you are a tech company and choose not to participate, you may lose the competition in the market. Although the executive order does mention,
“Agencies shall coordinate their activities under this order with their senior agency officials for privacy and civil liberties and ensure that privacy and civil liberties protections are incorporated into such activities based upon the Fair Information Practice Principles and other applicable privacy and civil liberties policies, principles and frameworks.”
But given the government’s record, those words have probably been added merely as a formality to appease the users, and the practice may turn out to be quite different. The only hope lies in the possibility that tech companies hold government accountable if it tries to cross the line of user privacy.
Source: Exec order
Courtesy: Tech dirt
[ttjad keyword=”htc-phones”]
