Rudy Giuliani, newly appointed leader of the team of private security experts talks to the press pool about hacking, “fake news” and the intelligence capabilities that need to be improved once Trump administration takes power.
President-elect Donald Trump has announced his decision to appoint the former New York City Mayor, Rudy Giuliani to form a team of private sector cybersecurity experts.
Rudy Giuliani said that President-elect Trump wants our cyber defense to catch up with our offense and that this issue cannot be confined to just the government. Giuliani has compared the cyber security problems to cancer research saying that there is a shared feeling that if we brought all the people who are working on cancer research in the same room that they might be able to cure it. In his opinion, the same goes with the cyber security and he is looking forward to bringing all the people from private and government sectors in the same room in order to seek best global solutions on cyber defense.
Giuliani will be doing this as a private citizen and in his own private time. His job will be to act as a facilitator between the leaders of the private sector and Trump administration.
A former New York mayor has offered a reassurance that President-elect Trump has a “tremendous knowledge of hacking and was very determined he would give us much more robust cyber defense.”
Here are the Giuliani’s views on the cyber security, unverified dossier published by BuzzFeed and the intelligence community.
Rudy Giuliani on cyber security group
The purpose of this group will be to bring to him top executives and thought leaders in the private sector who are number one experiencing problems, but number two are also working on the solutions to the problems.We need that in the private sector and we need that in the government. Many of the solutions and many of the problems are in the private sector.
I spent a lot of time working on that and it is going to be my job to bring these people to the president and the rest of the administration so they can share their problems and solutions. Everyone knows that and Rex Tillerson said that our cyber defense is not what it should be.
Rudy Giuliani on hacking
First of all, let me tell you about hacking. Cyber crime is the number one growing crime in America, Brazil, Columbia, France, all over the world. So we are talking from the smallest types of the identity theft to the hacking of the government.
The Russian hacking, although obviously very notorious and very big news, to me, is only part of what goes on almost every day. China, North Korea, Iran, and then, friendly nations as well, businesses, people, hacking is ubiquitous. The defenses to it aren’t as robust as the methods that people have for hacking. The industry has spent a great deal of money and time figuring out how to gather information and analyze it; it hasn’t spent as much time and as much money on how to protect that information. It poses a criminal problem, and then it poses a problem for our national security. You saw what happened in Ukraine, a year or so ago, an attack on our grid, an attack to our electrical system. So the first thing we’re going to do is try to create a priority of problems, and solve those important ones first, and bring to the president, and to his administration, the things the private sector are doing.
We want to make sure that to government is available anything that is going on in the private sector, not only in the U.S. but also in Israel they have a great center where they study cyber defense.
Rudy Giuliani on CNN , “fake news” and an unverified dossier published BuzzFeed
I think we have seen a lot of incidents of fake news recently, but I have never seen something as bad as this. I have not seen something as that : totally untrue, totally false, totally untrue where the man ( Michael Cohen) who was claimed to be out of the country was here in the United States at the time and it took two minutes to figure that out but it then goes viral and becomes some kind of a major story. I would also have to say about CNN that every other news organization aside from BuzzFeed, many of whom are not admirers of Donald Trump, had a good judgment not go with it.So I would say what President-elect said yesterday was correct. Remember, he began his press conference congratulating the press saying that his respect for them has gone up because the vast overwhelming majority of the press recognized it as fake news.Remember, President-elect Trump began his press conference congratulating the press saying that his respect for them has gone up because the vast overwhelming majority of the press recognized the unverified dossier as fake news. There’s only one network that reproduced part of the fake news, and I think they deserve the calling out they got from the president. And maybe it’ll help, maybe it’ll help so that the level of ethics that the other news organizations apply, in not going with the story, will now be applied by CNN.
Rudy Giuliani on the intelligence community
Look, changes have got to be made. There were an awful lot of things that were missed. When I look at the profiles of some of these murderers, and I see how often they were investigating, how often they were arrested and let out, how often major signals of jihadism were overlooked. When I take a look at Maj. Nidal, who was a jihadist for three years, four years, was all online talking about attacking, then when he killed people at Fort Hood, and nobody caught him before. I could go on and on. Tsanaev, we were told by the Russian government he was a terrorist, and somehow, we decided not to continue the investigation of him. The most recent case. I think it’s going to be very good that we have a new administration that takes a new look at, how we’re doing our intelligence? Can we do it better? I am a very big believer in using our 800,000 police officers as the eyes and ears of the FBI.
And, for example, when the FBI didn’t have the resources to continue to follow Tsarnaev, it should have turned over to the Boston police. There’s got to be a closer coordination between the federal authorities, who have limited resources, and all those wonderful police officers, of which there are about 800,000, who can be our eyes and ears. And maybe we can stop – maybe, I’m not sure – maybe you can stop a San Bernardino, or Boston Marathon, or an Oralndo, or the most recent situation that happened. So, for the president-elect to say he wants to see some changes in the intelligence community, that’s a good thing for us. It needs another look, and it needs to really be strengthened because we should learn something from the things we missed in the past.
The reality is that people who want to serve the united states in the area of intelligence, and I’ve worked with them for many, many years, 17 years in the justice department, are extremely capable people. Are some of them not? Yes. Have there been some major lapses over the last four or five years we should take a look at, and figure out, well, how could we do it better in the future? You could look at the Boston Marathon, you could look at the situation in Orlando, the signals that took place beforehand that weren’t followed up – you could look at Maj. Nadal, and how he was promoted despite the fact he had jihadist – not just jihadist sympathies but was expressing jihadist viewpoints. You could take a look at San Bernardino, and the fact that the people there didn’t report the terrorists who were seen doing something that looked like making a bomb in their, in their garage. So there’s a lot to learn from things that we didn’t pick up so we create a more robust intelligence operation, that picks these things up.
And my major suggestion would be, there’s got to be much more of an integration between the relatively limited resources the federal government has for intelligence with the vast resources that police departments have. If you take a look at a city like New York, there’s total integration through the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which I had the great honor of running for a long time, from both sides, from the federal side to the city side. And that working together is one of the reasons this city was kept safe. I’d like to see that happen all throughout the country. So I would say to the people in the intelligence community, don’t – you’re going to be improved. The desire of president-elect Trump is to improve your capability, and to also take a look at some of the lapses in the past to make sure they don’t happen again. And you’re going to need help for that. And the fact is, that if he criticizes this issue or that issue, these are legitimate things to criticize and to learn from so they don’t happen. Information shouldn’t leak. That’s wrong. It happens. It’s been happening since the Greek empire. But it shouldn’t, it shouldn’t happen. It should stop. And I would say, our intelligence capability has to be improved. Anybody looking at the history of the last 10 or 12 years, any intelligent person would say we have to improve our intelligence capability. And that may mean more resources. That isn’t necessarily a criticism of the people who are doing it.
It’s a criticism maybe of the resources that apply to it. And, sometimes, the lack of coordination with the local police, not turning information over to the Boston police, for example. Things like that. Those things have to be looked at. And people shouldn’t lose their morale over it. And if their morale is so… if they’re so nervous, and they lose morale over something like this, maybe it’s better off they be in a different kind of job. I mean, if you want to be an intelligence officer, you better be a pretty tough person.
You’ve got to be willing to take criticism. Just like I did as mayor: you make a mistake, and you had an emergency, and you’d go look at the emergency, we’d look at the mistake and we’d try to improve it the second time around. And I sure got criticized plenty of times, and I didn’t quit as mayor when they criticized me. What I tried to do is learn from it, and try to do it better.
Read more: The Three Most Important Takeaways From The First Press Conference Of Donald J. Trump