Keynote: Fireside Chat with U.S. National Cyber Director Chris Inglis

## Overview

During a fireside chat moderated by Jeff Moss, U.S. National Cyber Director Chris Inglis discussed the fundamental dynamics of cybersecurity governance, the centrality of people and civil society, and the evolution of public-private partnerships. Moss noted that civil society, private companies, and individual developers create and maintain the core infrastructure of cyberspace. Against this backdrop, the discussion contrasted state-mandated models (such as in China, where companies are legally required to support the government) with Western, voluntary strategic partnerships operating over dual-use cyber technologies.

## Flawed Models of Public-Private Interaction

Inglis identified three historical models of interaction that fail to deliver meaningful cybersecurity collaboration:

* **Deconfliction:** Parties operate independently, only interacting when an accidental conflict occurs ("bumping into each other in the middle of the night") and then resetting to separate silos. * **Division of Effort:** An explicit arrangement where one party handles task A and the other handles task B under the assumption of a clean seam between them. Inglis emphasized this functions as an "agreement to not collaborate," leaving each side unaware of what both could discern together. * **Subordination:** Attempting to impose a hierarchy where one entity reports to or is subordinated by another. Inglis noted this approach fails because cyberspace is inherently non-hierarchical.

Inglis observed that organizations routinely overestimate what the government knows, underestimate what the private sector knows, and neglect what both sides could discover jointly.

## Genuine Collaboration and Collective Discovery

To build effective defense, Inglis argued for moving beyond simple information pooling or passive information sharing. Instead, public and private entities require "professional intimacy" to connect disparate data points: * **Fusing Incomplete Intelligence:** Defending cyberspace requires pairing shards, shreds, or hunches from one side with unanalyzed or unknown data on the other to reveal insights that neither could identify alone. * **Non-Hierarchical Frameworks:** Collaboration must be structured horizontally to reflect the decentralized, dual-use nature of digital infrastructure.

## International & Domestic Implementations

Inglis highlighted operational efforts actively implementing this collaborative model: * **United Kingdom:** The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). * **Israel:** Analogous integrated public-private initiatives. * **United States:** The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) through its Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC). Inglis noted that while bringing multiple public and private entities together onto a single operational floor can be noisy and complex, the collaborative model is actively proving its value by surfacing critical security insights.