Commerce Secretary Gary Locke Announces NIST to Lead National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education

Remarks

Today, in his remarks at the Business Software Alliance Cybersecurity Forum, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke announced that the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has assumed responsibility to coordinate and facilitate the implementation of the Obama administration’s National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE). NIST will work across the government to ensure the agencies involved coordinate their efforts to successfully implement the four tracks necessary to meet initiative’s objectives.

This initiative expands the government’s cyber security education efforts into a national focus that will establish an operational, sustainable, and continually-improving cyber security education program for the public and private sectors focused on sound cyber practices. This expansion, and the new overall coordination role by NIST, is in response to the president’s priorities as expressed in his Cyberspace Policy Review in 2009.

To meet the initiative’s objectives, efforts have been structured into the following four tracks:

• Track 1: National Cybersecurity Awareness (Lead: DHS).
• Track 2: Formal Cybersecurity Education (Co-Leads: Department of Education and OSTP).
• Track 3: Federal Cybersecurity Workforce Structure (Lead: OPM).
• Track 4: Cybersecurity Workforce Training and Professional Development (Tri-Leads: DoD, ODNI, DHS).
• Subtrack 1: General IT Use (Co-Leads: DHS, Federal CIO Council)
• Subtrack 2: IT Infrastructure, Operations, Maintenance, and Information Assurance (Co-Leads: DoD, DHS)
• Subtrack 3: Domestic Law Enforcement and Counterintelligence (Lead: DoJ)
• Subtrack 4: Specialized Cybersecurity Operations (Lead: NSA)

Work is already underway for each of these tracks and subtracks. More information can be found here.