Obama Plans New Cybersecurity Executive Order

Order Expected to Push Govt Created 'Best Practices' Standards

President Obama is reportedly planning to issue a new executive order on Wednesday establishing a government created set of “best practices” for cyber-security which it will encourage companies to “voluntarily” submit to.

Obama is expected to push the idea of giant international cyber threats in the State of the Union speech, and will push the executive order after failing to get CISPA pushed through Congress last year.

CISPA was criticized by many, including some in the Obama Administration, for its lack of privacy protection, and indeed appeared to be designed to allow companies to ignore information sharing rules to give additional customer data to the government. It is unclear if the new “best practices” system will do the same thing.

Officials have claimed an enormous number of cyberattacks by foreign powers against US infrastructure over the past few years, though they have lacked any specificity beyond claims Iran made some banking websites run a little slow for a few hours.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.