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NSA Ill-Suited For Domestic Cybersecurity Role
Hugh Pickens writes "Former CIA counterterrorism analyst Stephen Lee has an interesting article in the Examiner asserting that the National Security Agency is 'a secretive, hidebound culture incapable of keeping up with innovation,' with a history of disregard for privacy and civil liberties. Lee says that for most of its sixty-year history, the NSA has been geared to cracking telecom and crypto gear produced by Soviet and Chinese design bureaus, but at the end of the cold war became 'stymied by new-generation Western-engineered telephone networks and mobile technologies that were then spreading like wildfire in the developing world and former Soviet satellite countries.' When the NSA finally recognized that it needed to get better at innovation, it launched several mega-projects, tagged like 'Trailblazer' and 'Groundbreaker,' that have been spectacular failures, costing US taxpayers billions. More recently, the NY Times reported that the NSA has been breaking rules set by the Obama administration to peer even more aggressively into American citizens' phone traffic and email inboxes. Whistleblower reports portray NSA domestic eavesdropping programs as unprofessional and poorly supervised, with intercept technicians ridiculing and mishandling recordings of citizens' private 'pillow talk' conversations. Lee concludes that 'if the Federal government must play a role, then Congress and President Obama should turn to another agency without a record of creating mistrust — perhaps even a new entity. Meanwhile, NSA should focus on listening in on America's enemies, instead of being an enemy of Americans and their enterprises.'"
The problem with the NSA is that it is part of the intelligence structure. If you insert them as a defensive player, more often than not, they will take absolutely NO action in order to protect their spying capabilities.
At present, nobody knows exactly what the reach is of the NSA. Nobody knows what they can and can't hear. If you task them with defending assets, each probe or attack reveals new information about what the NSA has at their disposal, depending on what the response is. I really don't think the NSA is willing to compromise the secrecy of its capabilities in order to thwart hackers.
Seth
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Here's an idea: if the NSA has gotten to the point that even the White House or Congress can't control them, cut off their funding altogether and wish their employees good luck finding jobs. Create a new, much smaller NSA that has the authority to do one thing and only one thing: handle security for other government agencies, such as setting minimum standards for TOP SECRET transmission.
I don't see the CIA contributing any code to us.
If the CIA wants the NSA to stay out of domestic security, I say they can prove it by putting their programmers where their mouth is. All I'm seeing from my point of view is the NSA doing a lot of contributing and the CIA doing a lot of bitching.