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13 February 2015

Is New U.S. Counter-Cyberwar Center Just Another Layer of Bureaucracy and Unnecessary Redundancy?

Bill Gertz
February 12, 2015

The White House national security adviser for counterterrorism announced this week that the Obama administration is setting up a cyberintelligence center aimed at providing better information and coordinated responses after cyberattacks that she said are growing more diverse and dangerous.

However, Lisa Monaco, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, failed to mention in a speech Tuesday that the United States already has a premier cyberthreat intelligence center: The National Security Agency, the supersecret electronic spying and code-breaking service that for years has been conducting cyberspying and cyberattacks.

Ms. Monaco told an audience at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace that the cyberintelligence center will be under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, an intelligence “czar” bureaucracy created after the 2001 terrorist attacks. Critics say intelligence professionals widely view the office as duplicative and stifling for the country’s overall intelligence mission involving 16 agencies and departments.

The Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center will be an analysis group made up of officials from all agencies, including the NSA, the FBI and others.

Ms. Monaco said “no single government entity is responsible for producing coordinated cyberthreat assessments, ensuring that information is shared rapidly among existing cybercenters and other elements within our government, and supporting the work of operators and policymakers with timely intelligence about the latest cyberthreats and threat actors.”

"The CTIIC is intended to fill these gaps," she said.

The center is expected to be set up in the near future, but no date has been given.

The NSA, known for tightly controlling its electronic spying takes, for several decades has been in charge of gathering and analyzing intelligence on cyberthreats. The agency has scored impressive successes over the years in the cyberspying realm as well as in conducting clandestine cyberoperations in support of U.S. national policy. The Stuxnet virus used to disrupt Iran’s illegal uranium centrifuge program was among them.

Under the Obama administration, the NSA has been forced to play a reduced role in cyberintelligence and cyberwarfare, given President Obama’s bias against giving military and defense agencies dominant roles in U.S. security.

Instead, the administration appointed the less-capable Department of Homeland Security to take a leading role in cyberdefense. The new DNI cyberintelligence center also is expected to be less capable than the NSA’s cyberwizards.

The NSA’s prowess in the cyber realm is unsurpassed in the world, as revealed in recently disclosed NSA documents stolen by former contractor Edward Snowden.

One NSA document published by Germany’s Der Spiegel last month revealed that the NSA is so good at cyberspying that it is able to break into foreign intelligence services’ communications links and steal their data collected from spies and electronic eavesdropping — without, at least until recently, the targets even knowing about it.

The activity was dubbed in the top-secret document on “fourth-party” cyber counterintelligence — spying on the spies — as “I drink your milkshake,” taken from a notable final scene in the 2007 film “There Will Be Blood” about oil drilling competition.

Ms. Monaco compared the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center to the National Counterterrorism Center, another DNI center that duplicates much of the work by other intelligence counterterrorism centers.

The cyber spy center will provide “all source analysis to policymakers and operators, and [support] the work of existing federal cybercenters, network defenders [and] law enforcement communities,” she said, adding that it will not perform functions assigned to other intelligence centers.

The center will analyze information gathered by other agencies. “It’s intended to enable them to do their jobs more effectively, and as a result make the federal government more effective as a whole in responding to cyberthreats,” Ms. Monaco said, adding that the administration’s budget includes a $14 billion request to protect critical infrastructure, government networks and other systems.

On Capitol Hill, Rep. Joe Wilson, the South Carolina Republican who chairs the House Armed Services subcommittee on emerging threats, said he was surprised that Congress was not consulted on the new center.

"If we are going to successfully address [the cybersecurity challenge], Congress and the administration must work together," he said. "That is why we were surprised to learn from media reports about the proposed cyber integration center."

On cyberthreats, Ms. Monaco stated: “Cyberthreats to our national security and economic security are increasing in their frequency, in their scale, their sophistication and the severity of their impact. The range of cyberthreat actors, methods of attack, targeted systems and victims are expanding at an unprecedented clip.”

Ms. Monaco said the major threats were coming from Russia and China, described as “highly sophisticated” strikes, along with less technically proficient but potentially destructive cyberattacks from Iran and North Korea.

Mr. Obama, in a recent telephone call to Chinese President Xi Jinping, raised the problem of Chinese cyber attacks and urged “swift work to narrow our differences on cyber issues,” according to a White House statement.

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