Beckstrom resigns National Cybersecurity Center post

The buzz online today may have been about Robert Scoble's exit from Fast Company, but there's a major change afoot at the top of the NCSC: Rod Beckström, the director, has submitted his resignation to DHS head Janet Napolitano effective in one week (that is, Friday the 13th). The move comes after rumors of ferocious power struggles at NCSC, which Beckström has led since its inception last year.

The politics at DHS, which oversees NCSC, can't have been much fun for the co-author of The Starfish and the Spider, a book advocating for "the unstoppable power of leaderless organziations." In his resignation letter to Napolitano, Beckström cited his ongoing struggle to keep NCSC out of the clutches of the NSA (which is run by the Department of Defense rather than the civilian DHS and operations from the intelligence worldview rather than that of security professionals or network ops) and noted glumly that "during the past year the NCSC received only five weeks of funding, due to various roadblocks engineered within the department and by the Office of Management and Budget." (Image courtesy beckstrom.com)