Public Administration

tHIS IS TO BE TWO 3 PAGE ARTICLE REVIEWS
1. You can use this final paper and the article on Cyber-security to write a review of the article.
The one source is supplied with the article.
2. The second article can be retrieved at http://www.unpan.org/PublicAdministrationNews/tabid/115/mctl/ArticleView/ModuleID/1467/articleId/39792/Default.aspx
3D printing.

http://writerslabs.com/file?alias=XPA_501_-_CYBERSECURITY_-_F16.pdf&file=442371314_support_XPA_501_-_CYBERSECURITY_-_F16_ogKappmGnfYpqUA.pdf
The New Policy World of Cybersecurity
Briefing Paper II
Review of “The New Policy World of Cybersecurity” by Richard J. Harknett and James A. Stever
Public Administration Review, May/June 2011: 455-460

Summary
The article talks about how the military, private sector corporations, retail shoppers, and government agencies have been, for the past few decades, shifting their functions and activities to the internet. This change is what has made cybersecurity a grave concern to the past two American Government administrations. These two administrations each came up with policies and new ways of trying to make the cyberspace safer for all its users. However, as noted in the article, coming up with a comprehensive policy on the nations cybersecurity has proven to be quite a challenge. Up to the time, the article was published, the United States still had no practical policy framework that methodically laid out the particular parameters and issues that constrained the development of a comprehensive strategy on cyber security. The difficulty in finding a proper solution to the issue was due to the nature of the problem itself. The cybersecurity issue did not fit the conventional security groups that were based on corporate or economic security issues, individual responsibilities, and international versus domestic problems etcetera.
The cybercriminal does not depend on a pistol to carry out his robbery; he relies on weak passwords and software codes that are embedded in the networks from which he intends to steal. Dealing with such a criminal is not easy because he can be miles away from the system he plans to rob but still carry out a successful robbery and still manage to remain anonymous. The criminal could even capture a computer owned by someone else and use it to commit his crime, making the owner of the computer appear to be responsible for his crime. It is, therefore, impossible for any government to exercise territorial controls on cyber criminals like they can on terrorists and illegal immigrants. The Federal Bureau of Investigations just has to corporate with law enforcement bodies from other countries to have a better chance of solving the issue. The government also has to corporate with the private sector if they are going to stand a better chance of preventing future incidences of cyber security. The Bush administration came up with the Department of Homeland Security to address the issues of cybersecurity. To them, the issue needed to be addressed from bottom-up. The Obama administration came in with a new idea that put the White House in charge of the issue. For the Obama regime, the issue needed to be addressed top-down. However, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) had a problem with the new approach adopted by the Obama regime. It said that the new methods had the same issues as those of the Bush administration and proposed a few ways which they thought could help better the already existent policies of the Obama and Bush administrations.
The authors then conclude that all the efforts that the Obama and Bush administrations have used to try to solve the problem of cybersecurity have been little on strategy and more on incremental steps. “The Bush administration released the National Strategy for Securing Cyberspace” (NSSC) in 2003 (p. 456). This document acknowledged the existent threats to cybersecurity and suggested coordinated efforts by the nation to solve the problem. The administration came up with a new policy in 2008 which was typically an outgrowth of the 2003 document. In 2009, the Obama regime tried to do away with the incrementalism that was prevalent in the Bush administration (p. 456). However, the GAO report noted that that approach had not produced any significant results up to the date the article was published. Besides, the director of Obama’s cybersecurity policies seemed to have adopted an incremental tone similar to that witnessed in the Bush regime (p.457). The article then concludes that leaders need to be selfless and collaborate with the private sector as well as other bodies if any meaningful strategic solution on the cyberspace issue is going to be born.
Theme
The theme of the article by Harknett and Stever is pointing out how unique the challenges associated with cybersecurity are and illustrating the possible solutions to the problems. As mentioned on the first page of the article, the issue of cybersecurity beats the traditional categories of security that were based on corporate or economic safety, security responsibilities if individuals, issues about military security, as well as international versus domestic problems. The article discusses possible solutions as proposed by different bodies within different presidential administrations. All in all, the article accepts that most of the answers provided by the two administration discussed in the article involve incremental steps but minimal strategy. The broader question that the writers pose to the audience is whether the future government administrations would be able to come up with a plan based on a voluntary partnership between the public “sector and the private sector to tackle the” cyber security threats (p. 460). This strategy, the writers say, should be free of the interactions of desperate and self-interested players.
Topic
The topic under consideration in this article is how public administrations; the US governments to be particular, can use their authority to come up with a good strategy to amicably solve the cybercrime problems. The subjects of investigation are the Bush and Obama administrations. The broader topic that the authors were trying to illustrate by investigating the two administrations was the approach that has always been adopted towards the solution of the cybersecurity issue in America. The authors state that most of the methods that the governments have used so far are just incremental steps on the previously initiated ones. The Obama regime is said to have come in with a renewed enthusiasm for the subject and tried to come up with entirely new strategies which ended up producing the same poor results as those of the Bush administration. Consequently, the government was forced to go back to the methods used by the Bush administration and just improve on them slightly. The article enriches the reader’s understanding of public administration by providing them with information on bodies like the GAO and how they help in keeping the government in check.
Method of Inquiry
The method used by the two writers to source for their information was qualitative research. Qualitative research can be defined as research that explores the specifics of a case to comprehend the underlying motivations, opinions, and reasons that form the case. This type of the investigation gives the researcher an insight into the situation and aids them in developing a hypothesis necessary for quantitative research. The two authors went through articles, newspaper magazines, and other pieces of literature available and produced a compelling article on the cybersecurity problem. Some of the most relevant documents that the authors reviewed were the GAO report, the Office of Management and Budget report (OMB), and the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI). Most of these documents provided evidence of the incrementalism in the approaches that the two governments adopted in dealing with cybercrime. This information is what the authors use to draw the conclusion that the strategies in tackling cybercrime issues have so far been mostly incremental.
Findings
The findings of the authors are scattered all over the article, however, the main finding which concludes the article is that the Obama and Bush administrations both employed incremental steps with minimal strategy in tackling the issues around cybersecurity. One of the first findings that the reader meets in the article is that of the nature of the cybersecurity problems. From their research, the authors discover that the issue of cybersecurity is not like any other problem the US has faced in the past. It is an epiphenomenon of the internet and computer revolution. The internet and the computer are very convenient tools that form part of the lives of many people and institutions of the twenty-first century. However, these convenient modern tools have serious security loopholes which if properly exploited, are capable of bringing down nations. Many prominent organizations and militaries use the internet and computers to store and transmit crucial data. If the criminals get their hands on this information, it could have serious effects on nations.
The authors further researched into cybersecurity policies during the Bush administration and those during the Obama administration. The study revealed that the cybersecurity policies during the Bush error were anchored on two pillars. The first one was the bottom-up strategy and the second one was the importation of the deterrence logic from the cold war to solve cyber security problems. The idea behind the deterrence strategy was that the attackers might feel demotivated from committing the cyber-attacks if they feel that their actions might be too expensive and not likely to achieve the objective. This was the primary strategy used by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) which was in charge of the cybercrime issues during the Bush regime. When the Obama administration came to power, they felt that the DHS approach was too slow, and they came up with “a report titled Cyberspace Policy Review: Assuring a Trusted and Resilient Information and Communications Infrastructure” (p. 457). In this document, they proposed their new top-down strategy and instructed the relevant institutions to conduct a thorough review of the existent structures and policies on cybersecurity. Obama’s administration made the white house in charge of cybersecurity issues. However, as the article revealed, the GAO conducted an audit on Obama’s new methods and realized that the results were not any different from the previous administrations. It then proposed individual strategies which they thought would be helpful, and the Obama regime adopted most of them. This significant finding is what led the authors to make the main conclusion that the two administrations used incremental steps but minimal strategy while dealing with the cybersecurity issues.
Assessment
The article displays what qualitative research should look like. The authors carefully examined the two administrations and their policies on cybersecurity. They also sourced for an independent opinion from the Government Accountability Office and analyzed the positives and negatives of the report. After gaining more insight into the issue under discussion, the authors then put together their hypothesis based on their findings. Their article is not very long but has a lot of information regarding the cybersecurity issues in the US and how they can be solved. Their paper will act as a valuable resource for scholars who intend to conduct more research on the area. They could use this article to find out what they need to know about specific policies, and which documents they need to refer to, to get that information. For students and other citizens who just like to be in the know, the article is not too long to be read. One can go through the article in a relatively short time and gain a lot of information on the cybersecurity challenges in America.
References
Harknett, R. J., & Stever, J. A. (2011). The new policy world of cybersecurity. Public Administration Review, 71(3), 455-460.