Last week, news hit the wire that current U.S. Cybersecurity Czar, Howard Schmidt, is retiring to spend time with family and friends—and ride his motorcycle. Now, amidst a strange atmosphere of legislation regarding the state of cybersecurity in the United States the White House is seeking to tap a new official to take his place and that would be Michael Daniel, a 17-year veteran of the Office of Management and Budget’s national security division.

According to The Washington Post, although Daniel happens to be a budget official, he’s been placed highly in the role of managing security and “has overseen classified programs being run by U.S. spy agencies and the Defense Department. He has also coordinated the budgets for the government’s cybersecurity programs.”

The statement from the White House includes numerous accolades for Daniel, noting that he’s been involved in “virtually every major issue affecting the Intelligence Community.” His work with the Defense Department means that he should be aware of what’s rolling around in the minds of the military and the NSA. As cybersecurity coordinator, he will be advising the President as to new policies and legislation arising on this topic.

“I am very honored to be asked to take on such an important role, especially at a time when cybersecurity issues are so prominent,” said Daniel in a statement. “The challenges in this area are real and serious, but I have the benefit of building on the progress Howard has made through his leadership and I look forward to continuing my career in public service in a new way.”

Already we’ve seen some poorly received legislation pass the House in the form of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing and Protection Act—or CISPA—which displays a culture of misunderstanding of what makes security by opening up the door to huge privacy concerns. Any cybersecurity coordinator taking the role right now will need to stay abreast of our nation’s attempts to secure itself from cyberthreats both foreign and domestic and at the same time weigh those risks against the necessity for privacy.

Much of the current lawmaking attention is being directed towards national infrastructure and data services with legislators calling for policies that operate electric power plants, water supply, banking systems subject themselves to the basic cybersecurity standards. However, cybersecurity is more than just a moving target, it’s a case-by-case systems paradigm that depends on many factors so it might be difficult to write these requirements into law.

The idea is to avoid possible events similar to what was feared to have happened to a water pumping station in Illinois—discovered to be an overreaction—or what happened to medical records in Utah. Infrastructure would be a favorite target for hackers as will be any large-enough database of information available online (social security records, medical records, law enforcement archives.) As we’ve seen the hacker mayhem group LulzSec made a mockery of several different law enforcement agencies by breaking into their e-mail archives on more than one occasion and they’re not even professionals.

Daniel will find himself walking into an atmosphere of political struggle about how the nation should approach problems such as LulzSec and Anonymous as much as concerns about foreign powers looking to steal state secrets. While it’s unlikely that cyberterrorism will be at our door anytime soon—it’s not exactly a lucrative operation to hit another country’s power grid in this era, especially the United States—but it would be foolish to even connect the control system of a water pump or a power grid to general communications.

Still, we have a climate of uncertainty moving into the future and cybersecurity is a quickly growing industry. A budget official will probably keep that in mind as he advises the President about who to listen to about making laws to that effect.