Strauss Center News

Updates from the Strauss Center and our affiliated distinguished scholars and fellows

Categories

Chesney Breaks Down the New Executive Order on Cybersecurity

Jun 7, 2021 |

Professor Robert Chesney, Director of the Strauss Center, James A. Baker Chair in the Rule of Law and World Affairs, and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the University of Texas School of Law, recently published a Lawfare piece explaining President Biden’s recent executive order on cybersecurity. Professor Chesney began his assessment by explaining how executive orders work, noting that they “bind the rest of the executive branch to take certain actions,” and they express the president’s will for guiding interagency coordination. Chesney then highlighted the specific cyber issues which the President Biden’s EO addresses, namely: preventing intrusion, minimizing the impact of intrusion, detecting and responding the intrusion, and learning (and disseminating) lessons from intrusion. In the third section of the explainer, Chesney dives into the specifics of the operative sections of the EO (sections two through section nine), highlighting the most important takeaways from each section and noting the historical incidents which generated the inclusion of each section. In this section, Chesney paid special attention to the federal government’s shift towards secure cloud adoption practices and guidelines, the vulnerabilities of federal information systems, guidance related to software supply chain security, and the need to standardize cyber response playbooks among federal agencies. He concludes by underscoring that this EO was made in response to the SolarWinds/Sunburst and Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities, and therefore it does not address critical infrastructure security. While Chesney deems the EO as “not revolutionary,” he does conclude that it is a smart response to some recent lessons learned in the field of U.S. cybersecurity. Chesney also highlights the remaining challenges and questions relating to the EO, and notes that further action will need to be taken by Congress to provide the resources necessary to “realize the full impact of these new policies.” Read the full explainer here.

strausscenter_black