The Obama administration on Tuesday plans to declassify portions of the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, created during the Bush administration as a secret effort to harness the nation’s defensive and offensive strategies for protecting commercial and government networks.
The announcement is to be made by Howard A. Schmidt, the industry cybersecurity veteran who was appointed in December as the White House Internet security adviser, at an industry convention in San Francisco.
The declassification effort, which will not include the entire directive, will be focused on showing that the government has a clear and workable strategy for protecting the nation’s computer systems, Mr. Schmidt said in a telephone interview Monday evening.
The cybersecurity initiative emerged from a classified National Security Presidential Directive signed by President George W. Bush in January 2008. The initiative was intended to unify the efforts of various government agencies as well as to develop security programs to protect the nation’s computer networks. Although the budget for the program has been secret, independent estimates have suggested that it may cost as much as $40 billion over the next five years.
The plan comprises 12 initiatives, Mr. Schmidt said, and general descriptions of the 12 will be published Tuesday afternoon on the whitehouse.gov Web site. A portion of the initiative deals with the nation’s offensive plans for cyberwarfare, and Mr. Schmidt said that part would not be made public.
“The C.N.C.I. was shrouded in a lot of classification,” he said. “The president has said very specifically that we need to make sure the administration is transparent with not only the American public but with an international audience as well.”
In his first public speaking engagement at the RSA Conference, which is scheduled to open Tuesday, Mr. Schmidt said he would focus on two themes: partnerships and transparency.
“In order to be successful against today’s cybersecurity threats,” he said, “we must continue to seek out innovative new partnerships — not only within government, but also among industry, government and the American public.”
Mr. Schmidt also said his office planned to appoint an official to oversee privacy and civil liberties issues.
“I don’t think there will be any surprises,” he said. “Much of what has been going on has been what people would expect us to be doing.”
He said that the speech would represent the moving away from strategy and toward implementation on the part of the administration in specific areas like identity management and research and development of new technologies.
“I will talk about our incident response plan and the Department of Homeland Security secretary will also speak on the issue and go into more detail,” Mr. Schmidt said.
He said that he would not speak specifically about Google and the company’s recent revelations about intrusions that it said it believed had come from China.
He pointed to two specific initiatives as examples of the areas where the administration would try to improve cybersecurity: No. 7, which is an effort to develop a framework for international partnerships building a common cybersecurity policy, and No. 10, which is the effort to create an identity management strategy that would be able to balance the competing issues of security and privacy. Critics have been skeptical about efforts to end anonymity on the Internet, arguing that they will place limits on privacy and freedom of speech.
In his new office just a little more than a month, Mr. Schmidt said he remained optimistic about improving the nation’s cybersecurity preparedness and he believed he had the right people in place to do that.
“It’s a matter of getting the sense of urgency in it,” he said.