NSA Director Says Agency Is Still Trying To Figure Out Cyber Operations

Trailrunner7 writes: In a keynote speech at a security conference in Washington on Tuesday, new NSA Director Mike Rogers emphasized a need to establish behavioral norms for cyber war. "We're still trying to work our way through distinguishing the difference between criminal hacking and an act of war," said Rogers. "If this was easy, we would have figured it out years ago. We have a broad consensus about what constitutes an act of war, what's an act of defense." Rogers went on to explain that we need to better establish standardized terminology and standardized norms like those that exist in the realm of nuclear deterrence. Unfortunately, unlike in traditional national defense, we can not assume that the government will be able to completely protect us against cyber-threats because the threat ecosystem is just too broad.

Comments

Well, that was interesting...

[MindPrison]

...definitively the most honest thing I've ever heard to come publicly from NSA, ever.

Personally I translate that to "It's important that we don't see ghosts everywhere here!".

And yes, very! Even the NSA know they've gone out of hands here, they also have humans working for them - and nothing they ever do will ever stay 100% a secret everywhere, so it's a better strategy to play with open cards (which they have *NOW* learned the hard way) in the long run. Besides, you can't possibly store all the 1 terabyte personal computer harddisks in the world in even googles vast server-lands anyway. It's all about spotlight. If you're in their spotlight, you'll be spied on, your data will get collected no matter where it is. Going trough vast amounts of byte garbage will yield certain finds - but mostly it's just noise, people who use words that could be similar to what you're looking for, but ultimately...just noise.