Candidate Trump Criticized Obama's Cyber Doctrine. President Trump Continues It.

President Donald Trump promised big changes on cybersecurity after his election. During the Obama administration, the nation’s cybersecurity was “run by people that don’t know what they’re doing,” the president said during a post-election press conference. The Trump administration, he promised, would gather “some of the greatest computer minds anywhere in the world” and “put those minds together … to form a defense.” Seven months into the president’s administration, however, analysts are wondering what’s so different.

On most major cybersecurity issues, such as securing federal networks and critical infrastructure, Trump officials are in near lockstep with their Obama-era predecessors. Where they differ, there’s no clear Trump cybersecurity doctrine to explain the divergence. “It’s schizophrenic,” said Peter Singer, a cyber theorist and senior fellow at the New America Foundation. “That may be because of the absence of a strategy or it may be because the chaotic execution of that strategy undermines it.”