DOD sees little new funding to fight cyberterrorism

President Clinton's $1.4 billion proposal to protect critical information systems from cyberattacks will not fund as many new programs in the Defense Department as initially believed, a senior DOD official said today.

The bulk of the Clinton proposal covers programs for which DOD had already budgeted, said Capt. Catherine Burton, staff director for the Defensewide Information Assurance Program, which provides oversight, coordination and budget guidance for all of DOD's information assurance initiatives. "The impression that this was new money is not correct," Burton said, speaking at a luncheon sponsored by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association. As far as new critical infrastructure programs are concerned, funding is "fairly small," she said.

According to Burton, a large chunk of the money represents funding for DOD's Information Systems Security Program (ISSP), a $1 billion program managed by the National Security Agency that covers everything from firewalls to research and development costs [FCW, Feb. 8]. Funding for ISSP already had been earmarked in DOD's fiscal 2000 budget.