National Journal‘s “Expert Blog” on National Security asked me late last week to comment on the question, “How Can Cyberspace Be Defended?” My comment and others went up yesterday.

My response was a fun jaunt through issues on which there are no experts. But the highlight is the response I drew out of Michael Jackson, the former #2 man at the Department of Homeland Security.

It does little to promote serious discourse about the truly grave topic of cyber security threats to begin by ridiculing DHS and DOD as “grasping for power” or to suggest that President Obama has somehow been duped into basing his sensible cyber strategy on “a lame and corny threat model called ‘weapons of mass disruption.’” It shows ignorance of the facts to deny that cyber vulnerabilities do indeed present the possibility of “paralyzing results.”

Jackson neglects to link to a source proving the factual existence of “paralyzing” threats to the Internet — he’d have to defeat the Internet’s basic resilient design to do it. (Or he has collapsed the Internet, the specific way of networking I was talking about, with “cyber” — a meaningless referent to everything.) But the need for tight argument or proof is almost always forgiven in homeland security and cyber security, where the Washington, D.C. echo-chamber relentlessly conjures problems that only an elite bureaucracy can solve.

In another comment — not taking umbrage at mine, but culturally similar to Jackson’s — Ron Marks, Senior Vice President for Government Relations at Oxford-Analytica, says, “Cyberterrorism is here to stay and will grow bigger.” The same can be said of the bogeyman, but the bogeyman isn’t real either.

(To all interlocutors: Claiming secrecy will be taken as confessing you have no evidence.)

Jackson’s close is the tour de force though: “Good people are working hard on these matters, and they deserve our unwavering financial and personal support. For now and for the long-term.”

A permanent tap on America’s wallets, and respect on command? Sounds like “grasping for power” to me.

Cyber Security “Facts” is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog