How the President Can Shape the Role and Oversight of National Cyber Director

A "National Cyber Director"? Wow, that's a broad and difficult job.

Having spent a decade or more in "cyber" related activities I think it is vital that the director have a deep understanding of how attack and defense ACTUALLY works. This is a very complex, fast changing topic and you need to be able to distinguish the money-seekers from the actual effective proposals.

You'd need a lot of time with the military to understand their issues. You'd need a lot of time with industry to understand their issues. You'd need a lot of time with the blackhat community to understand their issues. You'd also have to fight "stove-pipes" that try to keep their information secret (e.g. 0-days).

You would almost need to create a "cyber immune system". It would have fast response teams (i.e. antibodies), "reserve units" able to help overwhelmed fast response teams (i.e. macrophages), "tactical units" that have expertise in specialty areas, such as air-gap attacks, cache-poisoning, and row-hammering. You'd need a wide network of organized reporting (i.e. a lymphatic system). You'd need specialty consultants on subjects like LoRa exfiltration (i.e. t-cells) and a large library like the one at CMU with a collection of malware (i.e. memory t-cells).

The scale of the problem alone makes it difficult.