Bend IT like Beckstrom

By Max Cacas
FederalNewsRadio

By all accounts, Rod Beckstrom, the new Director of the National Cyber Security Center at the Department of Homeland Security took an unusual path to his new government position.

A former IT CEO and entrepeneur, Beckstrom founded, and eventually sold a number of very successful Internet-based software and IT companies in the late 1990s, and in the year leading up to the 9/11 attacks.

Beckstrom told his story recently during the Government Information Security Leadership Awards banquet, held in Crystal City, Virginia.

On the morning of September 11th, 2001, Beckstrom was on a jetliner waiting to leave New York’s LaGuardia Airport, He says all that changed, however, when word came of one commercial jet — and then another — crashing into the towers of the World Trade Center, a place where he often held business meetings.

“I felt utterly hopeless watching those towers burn with people I knew inside,” said Beckstrom in his first public appearance since becoming head of the new cybersecurity unit within DHS.

After saying a silent prayer for the victims, Beckstrom said a “message of great clarity and simplicity” came to him as he contemplated the attack.

That message was: It’s a small world, it’s a fragile world, and no one is safe until everyone is safe. And you are called to serve the peace.

As it did for many Americans, 9/11 became a life-changing epiphany for Beckstrom. He sold off his interest in most of the start-up companies he owned, and turned his energy and skills to what he calls “the greater good.”

We had a crazy idea. We decided to have a network of CEO’s dedicated to peace. And we decided to model it after a successful “terror network”: al Qaida.

Over the next three years, he focused on developing a working “model” for al Qaida, so that he could form small groups of CEO’s like himself into “cells” focused on finding solutions to the challenge of world peace.

In one case, he helped form a cell of about a dozen CEOs from India and Pakistan, which, in the years preceding and following 9/11, were in a near-state of war with each other. He said that in January 2003, the execs, meeting in Dubai, came up with the idea for a brief meeting at the India and Pakistan border, as a gesture of their desire for peace. They got permission for the crossing, and the event made regional and worldwide headlines.

Beckstrom says two months later, his group helped broker an agreement between the two warring nations to allow a planeload of these same CEOs to fly from India to Pakistan on a goodwill mission. Pakistani President Musharaff not only welcomed the CEO’s to his nation personally, he did so proclaiming that the skies over the India-Pakistan border were now open, and that commercial flights between the two countries could resume safely, which, says Beckstrom, was tantamount to ending the war between the two nations.

Rod Beckstrom’s work with those CEOs caught the attention of Mike McConnell, who would one day become the Director of National Intelligence. He subsequently met with DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, who offered him the top cybersecurity job just a few months ago.

He says he’s looking forward to using the collaboration tools of web 2.0 to work with agency IT secuity officers, much as he did with his successful cells of CEOs.

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On the Web:
DHS – Biography, Director, National Cybersecurity Center Rod Beckstrom

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