Examination of Witnesses (Questions 177
- 179)
WEDNESDAY 16 DECEMBER 2009
Dr Udo Helmbrecht and Dr Jeremy Beale
Q177 Chairman:
Good morning Dr Helmbrecht and Dr Beale. Thank you very much for
coming. You have come almost as far as any other witness that
this Committee has had for a very long time and we are most obliged
to you for coming all this way to help us with our inquiry. Could
I begin by just explaining some of the background housekeeping
situations. You realise that this session is open to the public
and the webcast of the session goes out live on the audio transmission
and will subsequently be accessible via the parliamentary network.
A verbatim transcript will be taken of your evidence and this
also will go on the parliamentary website. We shall be sending
you a copy of the transcript for you to check for accuracy, and
if you need to make corrections we would be most obliged if you
could make them as soon as possible; that would be very helpful.
Also, if after this session is over you feel you would like to
amplify or explain in greater detail some of the things you have
told us, again we would much welcome to have supplementary evidence
from you. A final thing which I always say is that the acoustics
in this room are very bad; I am rather deaf, so will you please
speak up. Perhaps now you would each like to introduce yourselves
and if you would wish to make some opening remarks we would be
glad to hear them.
Dr Helmbrecht: Thank you very much for this
warm welcome. We very much appreciate this opportunity to talk
about IT security topics in this round. My name is Udo Helmbrecht
and I have been the Executive Director of ENISA since October
of this year. My former position was in Germany, President of
the Federal Office for Information Security, so we were involved
from the management point of view during the set-up of ENISA in
the last five years. So I am well aware of the topics we are discussing
here. At the beginning the only remark I want to make is that
if we talk about IT security today it is really a new challenge
in the area of e-commerce of how we work together, how we communicate
together, and therefore I think it is very important that we have
this open discussion on this topic.
Dr Beale: My name is Jeremy Beale; I am the
Head of Unit for Stakeholder Relations at ENISA. I have been there
since April of this year so I am also relatively new. Prior to
that I worked as Head of the e-Business Group at the Confederation
of British Industry here in London; and prior to that I worked
for a number of years at the OECD in Paris on these issues, as
well as a brief bit in between at the Cabinet Office.
Q178 Chairman:
Thank you very much. Perhaps I can ask the first question, which
is one of those basic questions: tell us who works for ENISA;
what do they do; and, most important of all, who benefits?
Dr Helmbrecht: ENISA has a staff of around 65
people currently. We have permanent posts and contract agents
and we cover a whole range of skills in our Agency. This is because—if
you talk about IT security in society—we think that
we need different skills; so we have people with a technical and
computer science background; we have lawyers and economists so
that we can address the different perspectives of IT security.
We have recruited staff from the private sector, for example,
from the Commission or seconded international experts from the
Member States. A lot of people coming from the private sector
have experience as a Chief Security Officer—for example,
our head of the technical department—so this means that
we can cover the experience from the public sector, the private
sector and different skills for the work packages and work programmes
we are running. The benefits: what we try to do is to provide
added value for the Member States and for the Commission. So that
there are two directions. One is that we provide guidance to the
European Commission in the process, for example, of their legislation
via European projects or research areas. On the other hand, we
work together with the Member States, for example in building
up CERTs and having reports which they can use in their own Member
States. We try to do those things on a European level with cross-border
activities or cross-border needs in this area.
Chairman: I did not say to you both that
if either one of you wants to come in and supplement what the
other is saying we would be delighted to hear from you. Lord Richard?
Q179 Lord Richard:
Can I be fairly practical and ask you a few background details?
What is the governance structure of ENISA? How does it actually
work?
Dr Helmbrecht: If you look into our regulation
we have some formal bodies: one is the Management Board. The Management
Board is representative of each of the 27 Member States.
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