State Department’s cyber head to meet with Israeli officials

Christopher Painter will be going to discuss the United States’ vision for “an open, interoperable, secure and reliable information and communications infrastructure,” according to a press release issued by the State Department on Saturday. He will also talk about Internet governance, freedom of speech issues and international security.

The discussions take on added significance as Israel and countries in the West brace for a turbulent year. On Tuesday, an official in the Israel Defense Forces suggested the volume of cyberattacks had diminished in 2015 as a result of nuclear negotiations with Iran. With those negotiations over, he said, attacks should be expected to increase this year, particularly from actors like Iran and Russia.

“I think that some of the players in the cyberkinetic arena… have decided to take their gloves off,” Major Gen. Uzi Moskovitz said.

Painter, who has served in his position since its creation in 2011, has spent his term focused principally on convincing other countries to agree to basic standards in cyber. The U.S. successfully obtained agreement on its top priorities at the G20 Summit in November, when countries in that group agreed not to attack each other’s critical infrastructure or steal commercial secrets from private companies.

Following the summit, Painter told the Washington Examiner, he hoped to spend 2016 “really promoting the idea of international law applying to certain norms of behavior within cyberspace” and “getting greater cooperation” on cyber issues.

Related Story: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2579228

In addition to the bilateral talks in Israel, Painter will be speaking on a panel at the annual CyberTech Security Conference in Tel Aviv about the future of Internet governance. The U.S. is seeking to transfer the Internet domain name authority to an international body later this year, a process that has been delayed repeatedly.