12 Feb 15. Joe Martore, President & CEO, represented CALIBRE at a ceremony to kick off the cyber initiative partnership between the United States Army Reserve (USAR), industry, and academia. During the ceremony, Mr. Martore signed the Private Public Partnership (P3) Cyber Initiative, along with other corporate executives and university leaders, and Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Talley, Chief of Army Reserve and Commanding General, Army Reserve Command. The Army Reserve is partnering with six top-tier universities and 12 corporations, including CALIBRE, to train and employ soldiers and veterans who will become our nation’s future cyber warriors. The USAR is looking to build foundational programs that support our soldiers, enhance their skills, education, and training to develop continuously ready cyber warriors who can match their military and civilian career with continuous education opportunities at top-tier regional schools. To support the cyber initiative, CALIBRE will seek to provide employment opportunities to highly trained cyber warrior veterans for contracts supporting the military and DoD so that they may continue to defend our nation from cyber attacks. “This initiative guarantees the highest level of training for our nation’s cyber defense personnel, as well as an influx of skilled, experienced cyber defense veterans into the public sector. CALIBRE is honored to provide these veterans with the opportunity to continue defending our nation,” said Joe Martore.
12 Feb 15. President Barack Obama is expected to announce an executive order directing the government and companies to share more information about cybersecurity threats in response to attacks like that on Sony
Entertainment. As in other policy areas where Obama has been unable to get legislation through the now Republican-controlled Congress, the White House is turning to more limited administrative actions to advance its agenda as much as it can. The announcement could be tonight or tomorrow, when the U.S. president speaks at a daylong conference on cybersecurity at Stanford University in the heart of Silicon Valley, according to three participants in the conference. The move comes as big Silicon Valley companies prove hesitant to fully support more mandated cybersecurity information sharing without reforms to government surveillance practices exposed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. “We are certainly hearing that an executive order may be announced,” Nuala
O’Connor, president of the technology lobbying group Center for Democracy & Technology, said as she boarded a plane en route to the event. A new government center for cybersecurity, announced earlier this week by
Obama’s top homeland security advisor, could play a key role in the process. But the Stanford attendees said they did not have details. The White House declined to comment. Cybersecurity industry veterans said Obama’s anticipated order would be only a modest step in one of the president’s major priorities – the defense of companies from attacks like those on Sony and Anthem Inc. Administration officials have said they would prefer legislation that would require more information sharing and limit any legal liability for companies that share too much. They have said that an executive order could not limit liability. But getting anything through Congress on the subject has proven a daunting task.
That is unlikely to get much better without at least the support of big Silicon Valley companies such as Google Inc and Facebook Inc. Those companies, however, have refused to give full-throated support to cybersecurity bills without some reform of surveillance practices exposed by Snowden that have hurt U.S. technology companies’ efforts to win business in other countries. No grand bargain between the administration and the Valley companies has been reached, according to O’Connor and an executive at a major technology company. For that reason, and the fact they have not seen the