Trump’s Tweets Raise Doubts About Cybersecurity Approach, Law360, ft. Tad Devlin

Tad A. Devlin, partner in the Kaufman Dolowich & Voluck San Francisco office, was quoted in Allison Grande’s article published in Law360 (July 13, 2017) commenting about a sequence of tweets this week in which President Donald Trump floated the idea of collaborating with Russia to form an “impenetrable cybersecurity unit.”

In conversations this week with Law360, some legal experts said the president’s cybersecurity initiatives thus far stressing collaboration between government agencies and businesses could be compromised by a growing wariness about how consumers’ information would be used to advance cybersecurity, and who will have access to it.

Other attorneys offered the administration guidance on where the White House should turn its attention to harden defenses against cyberattacks.

“Domestically, Trump can borrow from counter-terrorism strategies by developing interdisciplinary task forces that combine intelligence, financial, law enforcement and other fields to monitor adversarial cyber-activity and undermine future attacks,” said Tad Devlin, a partner at Kaufman Dolowich & Voluck LLP.

An effective collaboration might emerge between the government and tech leaders in Silicon Valley, a partnership that could be beneficial for initiatives ranging from creating automated mitigation technology that is more accessible to a wider range of companies to conducting cybersecurity research on emerging issues such as the security of driverless cars, according to Devlin.

“While serious cyberattacks on the transportation system have not yet occurred, the Trump administration should still consider it a serious threat and seek out further partnerships with the private sector to develop stronger firewalls, security system requirements, and manual overrides,” Devlin said.

Read more at the full article.