The Philippines still lacks a mechanism to protect Filipinos from cyber attacks and thus a Department of Information and Communication Technology (DICT) is necessary.
Kent Primor, junior fellow at the Institute for Strategic and Development Studies, said among the ASEAN 6, the Philippines is the only country left without a cabinet level ICT department.
"If we're talking about traditional security, we're not prepared. How much more with cyber security? Essentially because we lack the mechanism, we lack the framework to protect us from all these cyber threats and risks. So I think we should be able to set up a mechanism that would protect us," he said in an interview on Mornings@ANC.
Primor argued that lack of coordination among government agencies is the primary reason why Philippines ranked 95th in the 2014 E-Government Development Index, a United Nations survey on government ICT infusion in their operations and public service delivery. He noted a digital masterplan can easily be implemented by a department of ICT.
"We have 19 departments... but they have their own ICT centers. Imagine if from the department level and these ICT centers do not coordinate with one another, how much more is the whole bureaucracy? You can just imagine how approval of business registration takes time. It takes 30 to 50 days for business registration here," he said.
Primor said there is now a strong push in both houses of Congress to pass the bill creating the DICT.
"I think the Senate version has been agreed and has been passed, and the House version is still going to pass, and this week the Congress is gonna move to pass it, whether they're going to have a bicameral session or not. So it's up for the President to finally sign the bill," he added.
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Quelle/Source: ABS CBN News, 10.11.2015
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