So after meeting Bob Maley, the former CISO of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, at this week’s CSO Perspectives conference in Santa Clara, CA, I am having some second thoughts regarding my earlier posting regarding his firing. While I still feel that the Commonwealth was technically within its rights in firing him, it seems to me that the people of Pennsylvania were done a disservice by the Commonwealth’s actions. Bob seems very passionate about the responsibilities of stewardship of citizens’ information and it sounds like he implemented a number of impressive initiatives to better protect that data. Yes, he did speak at RSA in spite of being told not to, but it seems to me that his heart was in the right place and that he took a calculated risk in order to highlight the need for application security in e-government. There also seems to be a political element t0 all of this (transition of administration stuff) as well. In the end, after meeting the guy, I came away impressed that he was willing to gamble his job (and lose that gamle with grace) in an effort to make e-gov initiatives safer for us all.
The nice folks at CSO Magazine published a good article on the topic… read it and decide for yourself.
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