2 November 2002
Richard Clarke
Special Advisor to the President on Cyberspace Security
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20500

Mr. Clarke,

The Professionals for Cyber Defense (PCD) reviewed the draft National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace. Although the plan includes valuable advice to counter lower-grade threats, a critical premise of the plan is fundamentally flawed: the scale, gravity and validity of the national vulnerability are not established. A plan to address a national problem must first establish the full nature of the problem; otherwise the plan is not credible. Therefore, we recommend that the government urgently initiate a scientific process to establish the scale, gravity, and validity of the national strategic threat of cyber war against our nation.

We expect that such a process will validate the repeated warnings from the technical community in reports from the Defense Science Board, National Academy of Sciences, and the President's Commission. So, our more detailed recommendations proceed from that belief. Cyber war defense requires orders of magnitude more government involvement and government resources to avoid overwhelming national costs and consequences from strategic attacks. Specifically, the panel recommends that the government: (1) step up to a strong defense role against serious attack, (2) focus on countering strategic attacks having real-world effects, (3) develop a top-down architecture and engineered approach to the defined problem, (4) acknowledge that current technology is insufficient to defend against cyber war, and (5) subsidize critical private defenses to defend against cyber war. The panel recommends that the proper government response, given the national threat is validated, will be to initiate a Cyber-Warfare Defense Project modeled in the style of the Manhattan Project, described in our 27 February letter to the President.

We stand ready to assist the government in the process of validating the threat and defining the nature of an effective response. We plan to send recommendations for threat validation under separate cover to help begin the process.

O. Sami Saydjari,
Chairman, PCD National Strategy Review Panel

Panelists:
Bob Balzer, Teknowledge Tom Berson, Anagram
Rich Feiertag, NAI
Patrick Lincoln, SRI
John McHugh, CMU
Roger Novak, Novak-Biddle
Allen Ott, Orincon
Sue Rho, NAI
Art Robinson, STDC
Laura Tinnel, Teknowledge
Ken Williams, Zeltech