In this “Secure in Mind” podcast episode, we discuss with Christopher Painter, the world’s first Cyber Diplomat. Christopher was appointed as the inaugural cyber diplomat for the US State Department by then-Secretary Hillary Clinton in 2011 and has been cutting through the global cyber dross ever since

After several in person discussion with Christopher, I finally sat down (remotely though due to timing! J) with him for an episode and I’m sure listeners will take away a huge amount from it. Christopher is the former Coordinator for Cyber Affairs at the US State Department and former Senior Director for Cyber Security at the White House, a role he covered from the beginning of Obama’s Administration in 2009, until the first eight months of Trump’s Presidency, in 2016. In this charge, he helped shape US international cyber policy and supported the creation of the Cyber Directorate Affairs at the US National Security Council. On top of this impressive background, he is currently a Commissioner at the Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace. Prosecution, Diplomacy, Cyber With his background as a Prosecutor and additional experience operating at the most senior levels of government and international diplomacy, Christopher is the perfect person to address the most pressing cyber issues governments’ face today, including dealing with cyber conflicts, fighting cybercrime and, among others, facing electoral interference. Particularly, he points out the reasons for supporting a stronger integration of a cyber agenda in every government’s top priorities. Public attribution, activism vs crime & the diplomacy game Our conversation was rich with coverage of the complexities involved in diplomacy e.g. shaping cyber dialogue, coordinating different support mechanisms and stakeholders, untangling complex adversarial relationships and posturing correctly to gain both internal and external desired reactions. We then moved on to a discussion concerning the need for inter-country alliances aimed at defense-driven information sharing and joint public attribution. We ended our conversation on the perceived purpose of hacking attacks and attempted to separate hacktivism activities (for privacy, freedom online, security, defense) and crime (data theft and leakage, public exposure of secret documents, unauthorized access to restricted sources of information) while also looking at the associated disincentives / sentences for criminal hacking activities. The Secure in Mind Project Our mission is to greatly increase and encourage community discussion about technological and ethical issues that have done, are and will impact society on a global scale. There is a longstanding and distinct disconnect between the way information is packaged and presented to the public and the effectiveness of this presentation in terms of generating informed, considered debate. If we can take complex, important topics and present them, as best we can, in a manner that can interests people from outside the speciality, then we have surpassed our expectations. Nick Kelly Bio Nick is someone who, in many senses, is just like you: a human being trying to make sense of this existence of ours as we hurtle around a ball of gas in a sea of infinite eternity. More relevant though are his vacillations in the world amongst diverse countries and environments, collaborating, negotiating, elaborating and celebrating with fascinating people from all walks of life including politics, technology, activism, military and intelligence the world over. He brings this unique breadth of perspective to the table and has a dogged interest in pursuing the human story behind the title or policy, appreciating the fact that underneath all of our bravado, political correctness and dichotomous states of creation and destruction, we are, after all, merely mortals trying to make the best of it.