Tag Archives: ross anderson

Ross Anderson commented for the Lightbluetouchpaper.com of the Security Research, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge the new proposal of the European Commission for a cybersecurity directive, which could be “harmful”. Apparently, the main argument for this is enhanced and centralized bureaucracy.

“Yesterday the European Commission launched its new draft directive on cybersecurity, on a webpage which omits a negative Opinion of the Impact Assessment Board. This directive had already been widely leaked, and I wrote about it in an EDRi Enditorial. There are at least two serious problems with it.

The first is that it will oblige Member States to set up single “competent authorities” for technical expertise, international liasion, security breach reporting and CERT functions. In the UK, these functions are distributed across GCHQ, MI5/CPNI, the new NCA, the ICO and various private-sector bodies. And the UK is relatively centralised; in Germany, for example, there’s a constitutional separation between police and intelligence functions. Centralisation will not just damage the separation of powers essential in any democracy, but will also harm operational effectiveness. Most of our critical infrastructure is in the hands of foreign companies, from O2 through EDF to Google; moving cybersecurity cooperation from the current loose association of private-public partnerships to a centralised, classified system will make it harder for most of them to play.”

Read the whole comment HERE

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