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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

A better way to phase this is that Giuliani's private consulting business is a cybersecurity adviser. Giuliani himself likely has no expertise in the field at all.

Overall the US is going to keep getting successfully exploited until they actually ask subject experts how to defend themselves rather than lawyers, MBAs, and politicians.

This is something Obama did very well with the "The United States Digital Service." He cut out the useless empty suites, got in a bunch of subject experts, and accomplished things.

Can you imagine how critical the media would be if Trump's defence advisor was a lawyer? But for IT and cyber security that's just fine I guess...

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Giuliani's firm is involved in cybersecurity primarily on the crisis management/internal investigation/liability side of things. Not "how do you harden your servers," but "how do you prepare your organization for when you get hacked," and "when you do get hacked, how do you respond?" Which is how most large organizations view "cybersecurity."

It should be noted that Secretaries of Defense often are not soldiers (the current one isn't).

While true, both Gates and Panetta had military and intelligence experience.

If the value in column X is less than the value in column Y, we don't fix the problem. Something like that, from Fight Club.

There's also a law that the Secretary of Defense must have left active duty at least seven years ago to be eligible to take the position:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Secretary_of_Def...

Unless it's waived...

http://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/01/12/us-senate-panel-b...

I would read it as "Trump administration enters intelligence-sharing agreement with Giuliani consultancy".

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10158063868120483&se...

https://twitter.com/Viss/status/819686452002861056

What exactly did Obama accomplish with the Digital Service? It's an honest question, seems like he's more known for literally every single agency getting hacked and their inability to launch a healthcare website, what have been the accomplishments that weren't reported as much?

U.S. government networks have been exploited since they were interconnected with outside nodes; [1][2][3] this should not be linked with any U.S. president's tenure.

The USDS's major accomplishment appears to be modernizing the White House's IT infrastructure [4], which was embarrassingly obsolete.

According to its website, the Digital Service has been automating internal government processes, most notably Veterans Affairs and U.S. Customs and Immigration Services. [5]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo's_Egg

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonlight_Maze

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_Rain

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/04/us/politics/technology-up...

[5] https://www.usds.gov/

This TEDx talk by Heather van Dyck [0] will explain how they rebuilt the VA benefits sites to reduce the processing time from an average of 150+ days and over 1000 different website pages to a single site that could process claims in a few days.

[0] - https://www.ted.com/talks/haley_van_dyck_how_a_start_up_in_t...

When I hear questions such as "what did person P accomplish with X?" I like to reframe them.

To assess the value of intervention X, one may want to compare the actual effect (E1) with some estimates of what would have happened (E2) if X did not happen.

If one does not use a comparison of this manner, one probably is not distinguishing between luck and causation.

To answer my own question, without the Digital Service, I would estimate that:

* Existing agencies would struggle to assemble a talented, motivated critical mass of software developers. Why? Attracting these kinds of developers requires cultural shifts and 'economies of people' (to riff on the term 'economies of scale'.) It also requires a concerted effort on hiring and knowing how to slot skilled technologists in government pay scales. Not all (few?) agencies have figured out to make this happen.

* Existing agencies would likely continue to procure work as before; e.g. through a maze of procurement and perhaps through some (limited, if any) internal development resources.

I would welcome a continuation of this line of thinking from those who have worked closely with and/or observed the USDS.

Well there have always been contractors but the ACA health exchanges had to work.. the first attempt did not, why because they were contractors and as one could surmise not actually effective at scale. So bring in the digital service who did things as they should have been done... This can be as simple as code to spec vs take ownership and go above and beyond. And it worked. It had to.

In the next administration Palantir is going to clean up.. why b/c of Thiel and because of current contractor ineffectiveness. The Digital 18F will survive but it's not clear that the agencies they serve will.

The ones that haven't been hacked are those that are still on ancient air gapped technologies (msdos/vax). This is likely a major benefit in retrospect.

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