The White House made its pick for the Department of Homeland Security' chief information officer, tapping former Secret Service and hedge fund security information officer Richard Staropoli.
Staropoli, currently the CISO for the New York-based Fortress Investment Group, was a more than 20-year veteran of the Secret Service, where he worked in the Presidential Protective Division, hostage rescue unit, the Counter Assault Team and as chief of Polygraph Operations.
At Fortress Investment, the New Jersey native worked on counter-party risk by investigating credit, real estate, private equity and liquid markets deals.
The DHS CIO position will be one of the more significant appointments for the young administration, which has made cybersecurity and information technology modernization a priority, with DHS at the fore.
As the department’s top tech officer, Starpoli will be in charge of not only determining the IT procurements for the 22-component agency, but will also be the point person for much of the federal government’s cyber defense initiatives. Staropoli spoke with The Australian on Nov. 19about the challenges facing the Secret Service to secure Trump Tower.
"It’s got significant problems," he said. "What are you going to do? Will you put a blast shield around the entire building? The first 30 floors are all office space, then you have 40 stories of very expensive residences. You don’t know who is in the surrounding buildings. You have a clear shot at it from Central Park and from any number of surrounding buildings," he told the paper.
"Even if you are Donald Trump, you probably have a car and a driver, maybe two. When you are the president you have 35 cars (and) you have about two dozen motorcyclists of the NYPD. Where are you going to put all this stuff? You can’t park it in the basement of Trump Tower. There were days when we took President Bush to the Waldorf, we had so many cars we had to close two streets."
He noted in the November article that he was a nominee for "an undersecretary position" within DHS, but didn’t specify which.
Staropoli was announced alongside a number of nominees to the administration on April 28, including Brock Long for administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Jovita Carranza as Treasurer of the United States, alongside a number of assistant and deputy secretaries at various agencies.
