New FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler announced a big change in leadership at the commission. Wheeler intends to name Rear Admiral David Simpson as Chief of the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau, which oversees emergency alerting.
David Turetsky, who had been leading the bureau, takes on a new role as coordinator of the agency’s informal task force on the FCC response to international disasters such as Typhoon Haiyan, drawing from his experience handling U.S. disaster response.
Chairman Wheeler praised Turetsky’s tenure as head of PSHSB, saying under Turetsky, “PSHSB took a leadership role in working to promote the availability and reliability of current and next generation communications to make people safer in emergencies, and crafted the FCC’s response to several significant natural disasters, such as the derecho in 2012 and Superstorm Sandy.”
Adm. Simpson has more than 20 years of information and communications technology experience supporting the Department of Defense, working closely with other agencies to “provide secure communication services and improve cyberdefense readiness,” according to the FCC.
Wheeler said it’s important to have someone with Adm. Simpson’s cybersecurity skills “at a time when our networks are continuously being attacked.” Simpson has experience “managing and securing complex information environments worldwide,” and can manage integration of communications systems in challenging environments, according to Wheeler.
Adm. Simpson was most recently the vice director of the Defense Information Systems Agency. He was also a senior delegate to the 2012 ITU World Radio Telecommunications Conference, and the World Conference on International Telecom. From 2009 through 2010, as Director for Communications and Information Services for U.S. Forces Iraq in Baghdad, Adm. Simpson synchronized strategic and operational-level communications for U.S. forces and helped the Iraq government build capacity for the information and communications technology sector.
