Top US cyber security chief steps down

Rod Beckstrom has resigned as director of the Department of Homeland Security's National Cybersecurity Center

America's top cyber security officer has announced plans to resign his position within the government.

Rod Beckstrom said that, effective from 13 March, he would quit as director of the Department of Homeland Security's National Cyber Security Center (NCSC).

Beckstrom said in his resignation letter to homeland security secretary Janet Napolitano that his resignation was down to an ongoing battle with the National Security Agency (NSA) over how cyber security in the US should be handled.

The NSA had been aggressively pushing to take over much of the NCSC's operations, according to Beckstrom, and had even been looking to move the centre's base of operations to its offices in Fort Meade, Maryland.

"While acknowledging the critical importance of the NSA to our intelligence efforts, I believe this is a bad strategy on multiple grounds," he wrote.

"The intelligence culture is very different to a network operations or security culture. In addition, the threats to our democratic processes are significant if all top-level government network security and monitoring is handled by any one organisation."

Beckstrom maintained that the agency had been neglected throughout the Bush administration, and had received only enough funding last year to operate for five weeks, owing to what he described as "roadblocks" from budget and management agencies.

The situation does not appear to have changed much under the Obama administration. The president's new intelligence director, Admiral Dennis Blair, said last month that he felt that the NSA was best-suited to handle cyber security.

Managing and securing the national IT infrastructure has been a top priority for Barack Obama. The new president has already appointed Vivek Kundra as the first White House chief information officer, and has promised to create a national chief technology officer to oversee all government IT operations.