Microsoft President Brad Smith says intelligence agencies need to share information to better protect the nation against cyberattacks.
Repeatedly in late 2020 we found people in federal agencies asking us about information in other parts of the government, because it was easier to get it from us than directly from other federal employees. A culture of holding information tightly is so ingrained in the government that even its contracts with us forbid us from letting one part of the government know that another part has been attacked.
President Biden has taken a couple of steps so far.
Check It Out: Microsoft President Brad Smith Says Government Agencies Need to Share Data
And if the Government asked MicroSoft to share data…
Andrew:
It’s worse than that the USG need to learn to share data amongst its own departments, nor is it confined to the US. Governments need to better track what data they have, what data they require and more efficiently leverage those data to full effect. Too often, inventory is suboptimal and an agency will turn to another source for data they already have. As Michael Lewis points out in The Fifth Risk, the Commerce Dept has data that most do not expect, and that goes unused. However, a major problem is simply the unwillingness to share, and the drive to own all data that might be of potential use.
It is this latter part that drives an undeclared but accelerating conflict between the private and public sectors over data and its domain.
Time permitting, we may take a deeper dive on this subject.