Recently, someone asked me whether Securing the Public Trust was political.
The answer is simple. It is not.
This book does not care whether you are a Democrat or a Republican. It does not care how you vote, what church you attend, where you live, or what your personal politics happen to be. There is nothing partisan about protecting a water system, keeping a city operational, securing employee and resident information, protecting public funds, or making sure critical systems are available when people need them.
I also want to be clear about something else. This book is not a defense of any political party, any administration, data centers, artificial intelligence, technology companies, or any of the larger political debates happening around those subjects. Those conversations may be important in their own right, but they are not what this book is about.
The book is about cybersecurity. More specifically, it is about how smaller cities, counties, water districts, utilities, and public agencies can protect the systems and services their communities depend on.
If you are the IT director, manager, or sole technologist for one of those organizations, you already know the challenge. Most cybersecurity guidance is written for organizations with large teams, deep budgets, and plenty of time to plan. Many public agencies do not have that luxury.
A small IT team may be responsible for infrastructure, cybersecurity, applications, vendors, backups, disaster recovery, user support, communications, and sometimes operational technology. At the same time, executives and governing boards want a clear answer to a fair question: are we protected, and are we spending money in the right places?
That is why I wrote Securing the Public Trust: A Practical Cybersecurity Playbook for Small and Mid-Sized Municipalities, Utilities, and Public Agencies.
The book is meant to be practical. It gives smaller public agencies a realistic way to improve security without pretending they have unlimited staff or resources. It includes a ninety-day action plan, focuses on the controls that matter most, and helps technology leaders explain risk in plain language to the people who make budget and policy decisions.
It is also not just for IT.
City managers, general managers, finance staff, board members, council members, department heads, and other public-sector leaders do not need to become cybersecurity experts. They do need to understand what is being protected, why certain controls are necessary, and what their technology teams are trying to accomplish.
That shared understanding matters.
There are plenty of things in this country that people will disagree about. Cybersecurity should not be one of them.
Protecting drinking water is not Republican or Democratic. Protecting payroll is not conservative or liberal. Keeping emergency communications available is not partisan. Protecting resident information, preventing fraud, maintaining backups, securing infrastructure, and keeping public services running are responsibilities that should matter to all of us.
You may have strong opinions about AI. You may have strong opinions about data centers, energy use, technology companies, or public policy surrounding any of those things. You may agree with some of those developments and strongly disagree with others. None of that changes the basic responsibility of a public agency to protect its systems, its information, and the people it serves.
That distinction matters to me.
A cybersecurity book does not have to become a stand-in for every political argument surrounding technology. Talking about protecting infrastructure is not the same thing as endorsing every use of technology. Talking about cyber risk is not an endorsement of a political party or political agenda. And explaining how public agencies can better protect themselves does not require anyone to change their personal beliefs.
Ultimately, the title of the book says it best. This is about public trust.
Residents, customers, ratepayers, businesses, and employees trust public agencies with information, money, infrastructure, and services they depend on every day. Most people will never see the firewall, the backup system, the monitoring tools, or the incident response plan behind those services.
They should not have to.
They should simply be able to trust that the people responsible for those systems are taking the responsibility seriously.
Hopefully, that is also a bit of a relief. This does not have to become another political argument. Cybersecurity in the public sector is something we should be able to talk about openly, honestly, and freely without first asking what party someone belongs to or which political debates they happen to agree with.
We can disagree on plenty of things. Protecting the public systems and services we all rely on should not be one of them.
If you would like a copy, individual paperback and Kindle copies of Securing the Public Trust are available on Amazon:
For municipalities, cities, counties, water districts, utilities, public agencies, training programs, conferences, or other organizations that need multiple copies, bulk orders can be placed directly through my website: https://robertrasha.com/books