Jen Easterly

So they go out and they explore and they find different pathways that we didn't imagine.

We have to be more imaginative to reference Jen Easterly's keynote about a risk of failure of imagination.

I agree with Jen.

Yes, we need to use our human capacity for creativity, for imagination, and maybe somebody can come up with the actual applied laws of robotics of Asimov and make it work for AI.

And

to that point, Jen Easterly, who used to head up CISA, just wrote an article on LinkedIn that essentially said, that's the floor.

It is not your operational requirement.

Correct.

And I, I think that's a, well, I personally think that's, what's helped draw in the crowd is that, that quality of relevant speakers, especially those keynotes.

So we've had Jen Easterly, Karen Elizari, coming up this afternoon, we've got Jason, deputy CISO of Anthropic and Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

I tell you what, I

am gonna be fanboy so hard.

on a global scale.

I hear it so often when I'm talking with international speakers, sort of in the post event debrief.

Jen Easterly even said, this event's incredible.

Like there's nothing else like it in, in the world that she's seen.

For years, China has conducted aggressive cyber operations to steal intellectual property and sensitive data from the organizations around the globe.

Says CISA, C-I-S-A, Director Jen Easterly.

Yeah, why do they do that, you think? Why do they do that? They do that because nobody says, hey, if you do that again, we're going to fly some planes over top of your nation and drop some things, okay? So let's chill out.

The hacking war is upon us.

But my thoughts regardless of language for this one is, I've been following CISA for years, and one thing that concerns me is the turnover in leadership.

Jen Easterly said many of the right things about cybersecurity, but the agency still faced challenges.

She departed when the administration changed in January 2025, and we've seen acting directors and other leadership changes since then.

I covered the proposed CISA funding cuts on my technology blog back in May 2025.

And so we've never really turned the spotlight on...

And Jen Easterly, the former CISA director at DHS, who was with me at Cyber Command when I was a one-star, one of the things she has talked about is holding the Microsofts, the software-as-a-service providers.

They're the ones who we need to figure out how to hold them accountable for delivering software.

And again, software these days is very complex, and so-

Right.

The quarterback that was Jen Easterly is the lead for CISA was that party that was going to execute that game plan.

And no small amount of strategy has to be done on the fly.

Audibles on the line, if you follow the football metaphor, but not just CISA, all those other organizations as well.

NSA, uh, I talk a, in the book about Real-Time Regional Gateway, which was recently declassified.

A young lieut- lieutenant colonel named Jen Easterly, uh, was in Iraq sort of managing that.

And, you know, the, uh, the insurgents were, who were very reliant on cell phones, they had no idea That we, we understood the content of a million phone calls a day in Baghdad, in Iraq in t-2005.

And we knew-- we understood who was calling who, a hundred million of those calls every day in Iraq.