Amid the chaos of the coronavirus, it was encouraging this week to see a bipartisan, blue-ribbon commission announce a coherent plan for dealing with the next potential catastrophe — a major cyberattack against the United States.
Covid-19 has given us all a foretaste of what a crippling cyberattack would look like: Transportation, infrastructure and health-care services would all be severely disrupted. We’d depend on good planning, trusted experts and competent leadership at the top — all qualities that have been in short supply in the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic.
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Democracies often aren’t great at planning; that’s the cruel efficiency of authoritarian governments. But in a welcome change, Congress took the initiative more than a year ago to create a group to revamp cyber policy that would cut across political and bureaucratic lines — drawing in members of Congress from both parties; representatives of defense and intelligence agencies; and top private-sector experts.
