Given the recent rash of speeches, announcements, and other venues in which various national security types have talked up the federal government's need to somehow involve the private sector in securing the nation's network infrastructure, you could be forgiven for suspecting that some kind of coordinated civilian information security outreach campaign is underway.

Take Col. Jeff Kendall, who sat down earlier this month for a roundtable discussion on the new Air Force Cyber Command (AFCYBER) at the Council on Foreign Relations and talked about the recruiting challenges that the US military faces in the area of what the military calls "cyber warfare."

"Perhaps we need a different kind of warrior in this domain," Kendall told the assembled group. "Today, all of our armed forces have a physical fitness test that requires us to do—depending on what your service is—required to meet some physical fitness standards. Perhaps that's not the right construct for these kinds of kids in the future—and I don't use kids pejoratively; they're all just younger than I am. So these great young American men and women, how do we attract them? ...they're not the same kind of folks that perhaps you want to march to breakfast in the morning."

Kendall also implied—half jokingly, half not—that not only might some potential cyberwarrior recruits be in less than peak physical shape, but they might have broken the law in the course of acquiring the 1337 hax0r skillz that would make them useful to the military. In other words, the military might adopt a "don't ask, don't tell" policy when it comes to the color of a recruit's hat.

Kendall suggests that part of the solution to the recruiting conundrum is that these cyberwarriors could be civilian contractors—the mercenaries (my term, not his) of the digital age. Another part lies in changing the military's culture and recruiting tactics. "We've got to change the demographic," Kendall said. So we've got to shed some of our own traditional recruiting mechanisms to go after a different crowd." Obviously, this is why AFCYBER was running commercials for the new command during the Final Four—to reach the huge cracker basketball fan demographic.

The USAF isn't the only branch of the armed services that's looking to recruit crackers. The Army is also after the same crowd, though Army Col. Wayne Parks didn't give much detail beyond the mere fact of this shift in recruiting in his recent interview for GovernmentExecutive.com. Parks referenced the Army's cracker outreach in the context of its overall attempts to beef up its cyberwar capabilities.

Then there's Department of Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff's remarks at the RSA security conference in San Francisco this week, in which he reached out to the private sector for cooperation in securing the nation's network infrastructure. Reports of the speech (see below for links) indicate that he spent a lot of time during his speech making the case to private sector security experts that they should be helping DHS secure critical infrastructure.

It's not clear how, exactly, Chertoff envisions civilian security professionals working with DHS on public networks. The Miami Herald indicated that DHS is on a hiring spree with some of the billions that the president has committed to spending on cybersecurity in 2009, and that Chertoff was hoping to fill staff positions.

I wasn't at the conference, and I can't find a complete transcript of the remarks, so I can't say for certain that Chertoff was or was not talking about hiring private sector security professionals when he spoke of public-private cooperation. My own suspicion is that he may have made his remarks with the Infragard program in mind. If anyone can enlighten me one way or the other, though, please drop me an e-mail.

Further reading