DHS removes all members of cyber security advisory boards, halts investigations

This is running here as a story about cybersecurity, but it's apparently every advisory committee at DHS; there were a bunch of them, mostly not about technology; for instance, the National Commercial Fishing Safety Advisory Committee.

Seems the Cybersecurity Executive Orders that dealt with Memory Safe Languages and the ONCD Report (which mentioned Rust, if I remember correctly) are all gone from whitehouse.gov as well.

The CISA report that dealt with memory safety is still on the CISA site. What do these recent developments mean for CISA? Is it an independent organization that will continue to exist without DHS support or is it essentially dead and its site and reports will vanish as well?

Can somebody give me a rational take on why? It feels immensely reactive. Salt Typhoon would seem to represent an active threat. Didn't DHS act quite.. conservatively?

A comment on the blusky thread went to "five eyes should stop sharing information" which I suspect won't happen, but I could see people thinking it should.

Whatever problems or limitations the existing approach had dropping everything on the floor is one of the least helpful ways of trying to fix it (assuming good intent).

Is this explainable in any way by the cost of running these boards? By the sound of it the cost-benefit of thwarting Salt Typhoon is probably not optimal at zero investment.

You don’t need advisory panels if you don’t want advice

It really is despairingly sad how many of these comments (assumedly by U.S. citizens) seem to not realize or believe these actions will have an effect on them.

Are some of these things normal SOP for a regime change? Sure. But to normalize everything under that blanket assumption is just foolish.

Unless you are an exceedingly (liquid) wealthy white male, you are entirely disposable to the incoming administration. You are less than nothing. If anything, you are an inconvenience buried deep in the calculations that needs to be factored out of the equation because your existence hinders the "progress" being sought.

All these pragmatic or, worse, so-called "libertarian" views demonstrate a supremely naïve, if not outright harmful (to yourself and countless others), understanding of what is going to be aggressively pursued these next few years.

The core tenet of Muskism, as described at length in Isaacson's bio is around those lines:

* question all the rules

* when in doubt, slash the rule, and see what happens

* if it's really bad without it, bring back the rule

* if you don't have to bring back 10% of the rules that you slashed, you haven't slashed enough yet

USA is now entering the phase where everything is getting slashed - following the will of the majority of -Pennsylvania- the people.

At the level of a company, this can bring great efficiencies, and make reusable self-driving cancer-free nuclear-fusion based rockets. Or crypto scams.

Unfortunately, at the level of a Federal Government, it will bring lower taxes, but some of the 10% will end with coffins. And crypto scams.

We'll watch from the other side of the Atlantic how the great libertarianism experiment goes for the USA.

I expect both impressive improvements, and dramatic karmic irony.

I think I understand the pullback from renewables now.

With this, along with all of the other recent events we have had the privilege of witnessing, we should be able to tap into the resonant frequency from the “energetic whirring phenomenon” occurring at Arlington National Cemetery to provide all of the energy that the country needs for the next century at least.

The problem with gutting these departments is that the repercussions aren't immediate.

It's like firing your ATC training team and then, the following week, claiming, see! we just saved a bunch of money and no airplanes crashed -- we didn't need them after all. Until one day ...

Then when some day a crisis situation occurs, there isn't an appropriate response because "oops, that dept no longer exists, or doesn't have the staff to respond". But who knows if Trump's lucky he might even be out of office by then and someone else has to deal with it. But in the mean time, VP Musk gets to claim "look at all the money we saved!"

Maybe some of the positions are redundant, but gutting across the board on day 1 definitely comes off as unwise and not thought through.

Good. From day 1 DHS has been the most Orwellian department of the US government, which casually violates our freedom on a regular basis. The entire department should be abolished.

Hello.

Probably because of Jewish people like me who had their computers hacked and told I wasn't welcome by security cameras near where I live.

I live next to former president's and being efficetively made into a holocaust victim with no proper recourse by the people ment to protect the president's makes me feel like they never should have had the job in the first place.

The swiftness here really cements the notion of a useful idiot. Makes you wonder who crafted the details then the execution.

The already highly compromised ideologues who seized control of the federal government are dismantling it because they said they would.

Every comment on this post is frighteningly uninformed about current events.

CISA is the organization that declared that the 2020 election was the most secure election ever. So it is expected that CISA would get "liquidated" by this new administration.

Fortunately, there are plenty of private sector companies investigating Salt Typhoon.

I can speak for the firm I work for. Our clients are effectively invulnerable to Salt Typhoon. Yes, I know that sounds like a "big claim" but it's really not. We enable our customers to run endpoints that aren't based on Windows or macOS. So...