Rudy Giuliani will advise Trump on cybersecurity
But the former NYC mayor doesn't have the best track record on such matters.
During an appearance on Thursday's Fox & Friends talk show, former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani announced that he would be forming a cybersecurity team for President-elect Trump. According to the Trump Transition's official announcement, the team would advise the President-elect on issues "concerning private sector cyber security problems and emerging solutions developing in the private sector." Presumably, this will entail more than simply writing things down on paper and having them delivered by courier.
"The President-elect decided that he wanted to bring in, on a regular basis, the people in the private sector, the corporate leaders in particular, the thought leaders, who were working on security for cyber," Giuliani said during the show. "Because we're so far behind."
"It's his belief, which I share, that a lot of the solutions are out there, we're just not sharing them," he continued. "It's like cancer. You know, there's cancer research going on all over the place—you'd almost wish they'd get together in one room and maybe we'd find a cure." That's right folks, Giuliani thinks that both information security and cancer can be "cured" simply by putting a bunch of people in the same room together. Golly, how has nobody ever thought of that before? It's like he's never heard of DefCon or the American Society of Clinical Oncology's (ASCO) annual summit.
It's questionable whether Giuliani will bring much more than access to the table in his new role. The former mayor's first position after leaving public office was as a partner in a newly formed consulting firm which provided "management consulting service to governments and business," according to the letter he wrote to NYC's Conflicts of Interest Board shortly before leaving office. Giuliani Partners proceeded to earn more than $100 million between 2001 and 2005 and transform Rudy into a globetrotting multimillionaire. However, given the firm's secretive nature and stringent use of nondisclosure agreements with its clients, it's not clear how much, if any, cybersecurity-related advising Giuliani Partners actually did. In January of 2016, Giuliani signed on to be the global chairman of Greenberg Traurig's cybersecurity and crisis management group.
Giuliani went on to explain to Fox & Friends that the task force would act as middlemen, connecting the President-elect "as well as anybody else in the administration" with "corporate leaders and their technological people." In essence it would give the Trump and his crew direct line access to the technology and expertise they need to, say, build a Muslim registry. At the same time it would grant quid pro quo access to any organization willing to put company above country and fall in line with the new regime.
