I’m sitting in for Joe, because he’s running the ACS Conference

so am I, ...and I’ll be blogging about it for the next couple of days, but I’ll be simul-blogging on SoundOff as well. The over 100 attendees of the conference heard a video keynote from Congressman James Langevin, (D) Rhode Island. Congressman Langevin urged the attendees to take back to their CEOs and managers his message: cybersecurity is an important issue and must be treated that way. “I hope that we can all get our egos out of the way and work together on this,” he said. Ironically, as Conference chair Joe Weiss pointed out, the two agencies who are not attending the conference are the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Energy. This reporter wonders why, when Congress clearly believes that working together is essential to the security of the nation, why DHS and DOE appear to be unwilling to do that. Unwilling to the extent of apparently deliberately scheduling the resuscitated PCSF conference to compete with this one. I thought there was some kind of law that says that government agencies shouldn’t compete with private enterprise, like the ACS Conference. I will be attending PCSF also. I was offered the choice of registering as “press” or as a “consultant” under my alter ego, Spitzer and Boyes LLC. As “press” I will not be able to attend two sessions at PCSF. Even though I sit on ISA99 and was one of the founders of the ISCI, and have been a PCSF member for several years...I am now told that I am not trusted by my government. What a shame. Walt Boyes