... As Sotomayor and Healthcare Reform Hang in the Balance.

By Kimberly Krautter 

Live by the press release, die by the press release. This is one of the many rubrics of public relations that I share with my clients. If you put it out there, it will likely come back to bite you in the nether regions, unless of course you have the actual solution in hand before you issue the release, and it's all a matter of clever implementation.

After his latest good will tour during which he once again donned the red cape of wisdom, liberty, and brotherhood, President Obama returned home to face his first serious national security failure. And this one is all on him. No equivocating. No looking back to say, "Nah uh, he broke it first." It's such a shame, too, because he should be returning with ticker tape headlines proclaiming him as a champion of the hearts and minds of our frenemies (now an official word from Merriam-Webster).

Last week's sustained cyber-attacks on some of our country's most sensitive government networks exposed how a country that lives by the technology can also perish by the technology. Someone (they suspect loony North Korea but remain unsure), used malware to flood more than a dozen websites including the FAA, the State Department, the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Treasury. According to an analysis reported in PC World magazine, the White House and Homeland Security were able to thwart the same attack when others couldn't because, "Too many federal agency security people did not know which network service provider connected their Web sites to the Internet."

This is precisely the kind of boneheaded cross-team communication and coordination failure that a cyber-security czar woulda-coulda-shoulda prevented. But we don't have one. President Obama personally addressed the White House press corps on May 29 to issue a statement on "Securing Our Nation's Cyber Infrastructure," saying emphatically that this is "key to America's economic competitiveness...a matter of public safety and national security...a key to America's military dominance." If indeed it is (and few would disagree), then it would seem logical that on the heel of that briefing the President would have announced action on this.

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