About the Internet Society 

Board of Trustees

2004 Board Election

Petitioner - Organization member candidate: Stephen Squires

Please write your support of this candidate to:
2004-petition-squires@isoc.org

Personal Statement

The Internet has become a global phenomenon but the Internet Society is not
the first organization that most people think of as a critical Internet resource. The society has not yet made the transition from an organization that serves mainly the technical community and early adopters to an organization that is capable of scaling to serve all the people who use the Internet or aspire to use it and those beyond the digital divide who may not even be aware of it. The Internet Society needs to transform into an organization for all the People of Cyber Space and provide effective ways to engage progressively wider diversities of people in the process of continuing advance of the frontier while reducing the digital divide.

Achieving the goal of having the Internet Society recognized everywhere is to have an educational mission focused on reducing barriers to learn about and access the Internet. Organizations throughout the global Internet community need to reach out to their local communities and leverage the
resources to educate and enable access for future generations. Reducing the digital divide should be viewed as an Internet Society Community Service critical to bringing the power of IT to all the People.

Cyber Security has become an international issue. The Internet has grown faster then the ability to effectively resolve the security issues as evidenced by the geometric growth of the "CERT Curves" (the continued increase in vulnerabilities and incidents). This is a threat to the continued development and growth of the Internet itself. Cyber Security needs to be given a high priority by Internet Society in all aspects of its mission.

Biography: Stephen L Squires, PhD
Hewlett-Packard Company
Vice President
Chief Science Officer

Stephen L. Squires is vice president and chief science officer for Hewlett-Packard Company. He is responsible for providing leadership in establishing overall strategic scientific and technical directions, including the architecture of the digital renaissance for the 21st century Internet.

Prior to joining HP in November 2000, Squires was the special assistant for Information Technology to the director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). During his career at DARPA, he was responsible for advancing the frontier of progressively larger sectors of information technology. He developed plans for, managed, and directed the scalable systems parts of the DARPA Strategic Computing Program, the Federal High Performance Computing and Communications Program and its extension to the National Information Infrastructure. These programs are recognized as having helped enable the modern Internet, including its scalable parallel and distributed high-performance computing systems and the introduction of an explicit service layer. He joined DARPA in 1983 as a program manager.

Squires was recruited by the National Security Agency (NSA) as a freshman undergraduate electrical engineering student at Drexel University. He worked as an engineering intern in the advanced computing and communications laboratories of the NSA. Throughout his career as an electrical engineer and computer scientist at NSA, he focused on the most challenging national security problems using advanced information technologies. In addition, he had early access at NSA to the full range of advanced technologies as they emerged, including many in cooperation with DARPA, such as early interactive time sharing systems with graphics, UNIX, ARPAnet, extensible programming systems, local area networks, the early Internet, personal computing, VLSI design, rapid prototyping and the highest performance information system technologies.

Squires earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He grew up in suburban Philadelphia where he spent most of his time discovering how things worked and inventing in his parents' garage and his own basement laboratory complete with a vacuum tube voltmeter, signal generators, an oscilloscope and a collection of transistors. He also had access to the laboratories of the Franklin Institute Science Museum, universities and industry as vice president of his high school's Future Scientists of America program.