#us cyber command

Olivia Troye at Olivia Of Troye Unfiltered:

While Trump's tariffs hammer the economy and dominate the headlines, rightfully capturing attention as Americans watch their 401ks drop, something perilous quietly unfolded in the shadows. A significant shift in the national security apparatus occurred that barely made a blip.  It hardly registered in the mainstream news cycle late last week when General Timothy Haugh was ignominiously removed as dual-hatted Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) and Commander of U.S. Cyber Command. Perhaps in the chaos of Trump 2.0, another outstanding leader being ousted is just business as usual. For the ones that did mention it, they pointed out that the action could seriously hurt America’s cyber defenses and make it a lot easier for foreign adversaries to strike our networks. They’re correct. But let me be even clearer about what’s not being talked about: this is not just another reshuffling of power—it's a five-alarm fire for anyone who values their privacy and civil liberties.  And it wasn't just Haugh who was shown the door. Wendy Noble, the highly respected civilian Deputy Director of the NSA, was also reassigned back to the Department of Defense. This wasn't just a firing but a purge of institutional memory, experience, and moral backbone.  Tim Haugh wasn't just any flag officer. He was beloved by his workforce, respected by national security professionals across the political spectrum, and known as much for his integrity and superb leadership skills as for his mission expertise. Haugh's departure leaves a void in one of the most sensitive and consequential roles in government. Whoever fills that vacuum could alter the trajectory of one of our most fundamental American freedoms: the right to privacy.

A Role That Holds Enormous Power

By long-standing tradition, the NSA is led by a uniformed military officer, while the deputy is a civilian. That balance matters. It provides both continuity and civilian oversight of a powerful institution with the ability to monitor global communications—and, yes, potentially, American citizens. Tim Haugh upheld that legacy of integrity. Similarly, with her deep expertise and decades of experience, Wendy Noble brought the kind of institutional knowledge and civilian leadership that protected that balance. But now, with both Haugh and Noble removed in quick succession, we're in uncharted territory. The critical safeguards that these respected leaders maintained have been dismantled, and the Trump administration has shown us what it's capable of when unchecked power meets authoritarian instinct. [...]

Why You Should Care: FISA Section 702

One of the most potent surveillance tools in the national security toolbox is Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Section 702 allows the NSA and FBI to collect foreign intelligence by targeting non-U.S. persons outside the country. Sounds reasonable on paper. It's a powerful and necessary tool to protect national security—used to thwart terrorists, identify foreign cyber actors, and uncover threats to U.S. interests. But here's the catch: in the course of collecting this foreign data, U.S. persons' communications are often swept up. That's where the controversy begins. This is where procedures, leadership, and the integrity of institutions matter. As a former commander of multiple Air Force and joint intelligence organizations responsible for signals collection, Tim Haugh knew how to protect Americans’ privacy. Yet while 702 is designed to protect us, it can also be exploited to monitor Americans on U.S. soil. Without proper safeguards, it can become a backdoor to domestic surveillance. I've seen the inner workings of this system, and I can tell you that it works when principled leaders are at the helm. But in the wrong hands? It's terrifying.

Remember Trump's Obsession with Wiretaps? Let me remind you of a key moment in Trump's first term. He falsely accused President Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower. It was a baseless claim, thoroughly debunked—even his own Justice Department and the intelligence community found nothing. But Trump's tactic wasn't random. It was a classic projection. Because behind the scenes, while I was working in the White House, very real and deeply disturbing conversations were happening. Trump wanted the Department of Justice to authorize surveillance of personal devices of people he deemed political enemies or leakers. It wasn't paranoia; it was authoritarian yearning. And it was chilling. So when I see Tim Haugh forced out, Wendy Noble removed, Pam Bondi at the helm of the Department of Justice, and Kash Patel—who is currently the Director of the FBI—calling the shots, that's not just concerning. That's a massive, flashing red warning light for the nation. [...]

This Is Bigger Than One Leader

This isn't just about Tim Haugh or Wendy Noble. It's about a pattern of purging competent, principled leaders and replacing them with loyalists who will enthusiastically comply with any order or request, no matter how anathema to our democracy. It's about dismantling the apolitical fabric of our national security institutions. It's about the slow, quiet erosion of freedoms that most Americans assume are protected until they’re not.

New Post has been published on https://www.chiangraitimes.com/will-chinas-digital-silk-road-lead-to-a-authoritarian-5g-cyberspace.html

Will China's 'Digital Silk Road' Lead to a Authoritarian 5G Cyberspace

BEIJING – China is set to connect developing countries in Asia and Africa with next-generation data technology, while companies in the West fall behind. But can Beijing be trusted with the future of the internet?

In May 2017, at the first Belt and Road International Forum, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced that big data would be integrated into the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to create the “digital Silk Road of the 21st century.”

Nearly two years later, this “digital Silk Road” is closer to going online. During a CEO conference held at the second Belt and Road forum on Thursday in Beijing, Chinese telecoms courted investment from global business leaders for the digital phase of the BRI.

China wants to integrate financial markets and connect countries and cities along its Belt and Road with a network of next-generation digital infrastructure and satellite coverage.

Strategists and technology experts who are critical of China’s intentions say that by building digital infrastructure across the developing world, China could end up dominating a large chunk of the global communications market, and therefore be able to dictate the future of cyberspace.

However, at this point, telecom companies in the West aren’t putting up much of a fight for the smaller markets that the BRI is aimed at. And, meanwhile, China is quickly taking the lead in developing and implementing 5G, the ultrafast data network technology that is set to turn the digital Silk Road into an information superhighway.

As of February 2019, Chinese telecom giant Huawei owned 1,529 5G patents — more than any company in the world. Combine that with patents by other Chinese telecoms like ZTR, and 36% of all 5G patents worldwide are owned by Chinese firms, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Huawei and the USA

As this next generation of data networks is rolled out, the US wants its allies to limit or block Huawei’s 5G technologies, and warns that Huawei-equipped networks could be hacked by Chinese spies.

For Belt and Road countries in Africa and Asia with less-developed infrastructure, China is offering a chance to catch up with the high-speed digital world. For example, Huawei is building Zambia’s communications infrastructure from the ground up, and Chinese e-commerce giants Alibaba and Tencent are planning services for small businesses in Southeast Asia.

But if tension between the US and China on standards and regulation grows, BRI countries that have been hooked up with Chinese technology could one day be operating on a separate system. Although there is nothing stopping these countries from using Western tech, Chinese firms can currently offer a high-quality product at a lower price.

This puts US and European telecom companies at a disadvantage. As Chinese tech takes over smaller markets, it allows for more research and development, which will reduce the competitiveness of Western tech companies.

China’s Innovation Dominance 

According to Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a US tech think tank, Huawei invests more in research and development than any other company in the world.

“That can lead to a virtuous circle where they innovate faster, taking even more market share from companies like Nokia and Ericsson,” Atkinson told DW, adding that once China dominates a market, competitors will find it difficult to gain a foothold.

As far as data security is concerned, the benefit of high-quality, low-cost data networks outweighs the security risk for many BRI countries.

“Each nation has to make its own assessment of the security risks of using Chinese telecom equipment,” said Atkinson. “If the view is that there are risks, there is no reason why nations cannot buy equipment from firms in the US, Europe and South Korea.”

China’s Version of Cyberspace

Chinese officials call the digital Silk Road a “community of common destiny in cyberspace.” But as Beijing begins implementing its digital strategy and starts installing digital hardware and networks in countries with authoritarian tendencies, like the Philippines, Malaysia or Zambia, there are concerns over what values this “community” will possess.

Nadege Rolland, a senior fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research in Washington, said that is important to pay attention to the “intangible components” of the digital Silk Road, such as Beijing promoting its version of internet governance norms.

“For semi-authoritarian countries around the world, a great number of which are under the BRI umbrella, the Chinese model of digitally enabled surveillance of their population probably appears quite appealing,” said Rolland, who is a former adviser to the French government on China strategy.

“As BRI countries become dependent on China for their internet, they also open the possibility of Beijing monitoring and diverting their data traffic, feeding China’s intelligence collection and technological advances in areas such as AI,” she added.

In February, William Mayville, former deputy commander of US Cyber Command, said that China was “unfit to own large chunks of the world’s communication infrastructure.”

Speaking during a panel discussion hosted by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Mayville said the US did not trust Chinese “modernization.”

US Cyber Command Thwarted A Cyberattack On Election Day (Video)

By now, it’s common knowledge Russia penetrated several states’ voter rolls during the 2016 election.

Since then, concerns grew over the 2018 mid-term elections, which, according to intelligence data, were just as susceptible to foreign influence as before.

Especially disconcerting is the fact that House Republicans this summer refused to fund election security in a spending bill, all but…

Navy Urged to Revise Ship Delivery Policy

Morning Coffee is a robust blend of links to news around the Internet concerning the Naval Air Station Patuxent River economic community. The opinions expressed here do not reflect opinions of the Leader’s owners or staff. The Government Accountability Office has urged the US Navy to revise its ship delivery policy to keep defective and incomplete ships from entering the service branch’s…

By James Bamford, Reuters, Aug. 4, 2016

National attention is focused on Russian eavesdroppers’ possible targeting of U.S. presidential candidates and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Yet, leaked top-secret National Security Agency documents show that the Obama administration has long been involved in major bugging operations against the election campaigns--and the presidents--of even its closest allies.

The United States is, by far, the world’s most aggressive nation when it comes to cyberspying and cyberwarfare. The National Security Agency has been eavesdropping on foreign cities, politicians, elections and entire countries since it first turned on its receivers in 1952. Just as other countries, including Russia, attempt to do to the United States. What is new is a country leaking the intercepts back to the public of the target nation through a middleperson.

There is a strange irony in this. Russia, if it is actually involved in the hacking of the computers of the Democratic National Committee, could be attempting to influence a U.S. election by leaking to the American public the falsehoods of its leaders. This is a tactic Washington used against the Soviet Union and other countries during the Cold War.

In the 1950s, for example, President Harry S Truman created the Campaign of Truth to reveal to the Russian people the “Big Lies” of their government. Washington had often discovered these lies through eavesdropping and other espionage.

Today, the United States has morphed from a Cold War, and in some cases a hot war, into a cyberwar, with computer coding replacing bullets and bombs. Yet the American public manages to be “shocked, shocked” that a foreign country would attempt to conduct cyberespionage on the United States.

NSA operations have, for example, recently delved into elections in Mexico, targeting its last presidential campaign. According to a top-secret PowerPoint presentation leaked by former NSA contract employee Edward Snowden, the operation involved a “surge effort against one of Mexico’s leading presidential candidates, Enrique Peña Nieto, and nine of his close associates.” Peña won that election and is now Mexico’s president.

The NSA identified Peña’s cellphone and those of his associates using advanced software that can filter out specific phones from the swarm around the candidate. These lines were then targeted. The technology, one NSA analyst noted, “might find a needle in a haystack.” The analyst described it as “a repeatable and efficient” process.

The eavesdroppers also succeeded in intercepting 85,489 text messages, a Der Spiegel article noted.

Another NSA operation, begun in May 2010 and codenamed FLATLIQUID, targeted Pena’s predecessor, President Felipe Calderon. The NSA, the documents revealed, was able “to gain first-ever access to President Felipe Calderon’s public email account.”

At the same time, members of a highly secret joint NSA/CIA organization, called the Special Collection Service, are based in the U.S. embassy in Mexico City and other U.S. embassies around the world. It targets local government communications, as well as foreign embassies nearby. For Mexico, additional eavesdropping, and much of the analysis, is conducted by NSA Texas, a large listening post in San Antonio that focuses on the Caribbean, Central America and South America.

Unlike the Defense Department’s Pentagon, the headquarters of the cyberspies fills an entire secret city. Located in Fort Meade, Maryland, halfway between Washington and Baltimore, Maryland, NSA’s headquarters consists of scores of heavily guarded buildings. The site even boasts its own police force and post office.

And it is about to grow considerably bigger, now that the NSA cyberspies have merged with the cyberwarriors of U.S. Cyber Command, which controls its own Cyber Army, Cyber Navy, Cyber Air Force and Cyber Marine Corps, all armed with state-of-the-art cyberweapons. In charge of it all is a four-star admiral, Michael S. Rogers.

Now under construction inside NSA’s secret city, Cyber Command’s new $3.2- billion headquarters is to include 14 buildings, 11 parking garages and an enormous cyberbrain--a 600,000-square-foot, $896.5-million supercomputer facility that will eat up an enormous amount of power, about 60 megawatts. This is enough electricity to power a city of more than 40,000 homes.

In 2014, for a cover story in Wired and a PBS documentary, I spent three days in Moscow with Snowden, whose last NSA job was as a contract cyberwarrior. I was also granted rare access to his archive of documents. “Cyber Command itself has always been branded in a sort of misleading way from its very inception,” Snowden told me. “It’s an attack agency. … It’s all about computer-network attack and computer-network exploitation at Cyber Command.”

The idea is to turn the Internet from a worldwide web of information into a global battlefield for war. “The next major conflict will start in cyberspace,” says one of the secret NSA documents. One key phrase within Cyber Command documents is “Information Dominance.”

The Cyber Navy, for example, calls itself the Information Dominance Corps. The Cyber Army is providing frontline troops with the option of requesting “cyberfire support” from Cyber Command, in much the same way it requests air and artillery support. And the Cyber Air Force is pledged to “dominate cyberspace” just as “today we dominate air and space.”

Among the tools at their disposal is one called Passionatepolka, designed to “remotely brick network cards.” “Bricking” a computer means destroying it--turning it into a brick.

One such situation took place in war-torn Syria in 2012, according to Snowden, when the NSA attempted to remotely and secretly install an “exploit,” or bug, into the computer system of a major Internet provider. This was expected to provide access to email and other Internet traffic across much of Syria. But something went wrong. Instead, the computers were bricked. It took down the Internet across the country for a period of time.

While Cyber Command executes attacks, the National Security Agency seems more interested in tracking virtually everyone connected to the Internet, according to the documents.

One top-secret operation, code-named TreasureMap, is designed to have a “capability for building a near real-time interactive map of the global Internet. … Any device, anywhere, all the time.” Another operation, codenamed Turbine, involves secretly placing “millions of implants”--malware--in computer systems worldwide for either spying or cyberattacks.

Yet, even as the U.S. government continues building robust eavesdropping and attack systems, it looks like there has been far less focus on security at home. One benefit of the cyber-theft of the Democratic National Committee emails might be that it helps open a public dialogue about the dangerous potential of cyberwarfare. This is long overdue. The possible security problems for the U.S. presidential election in November are already being discussed.

Yet there can never be a useful discussion on the topic if the Obama administration continues to point fingers at other countries without admitting that Washington is engaged heavily in cyberspying and cyberwarfare.

In fact, the United States is the only country ever to launch an actual cyberwar--when the Obama administration used a cyberattack to destroy thousands of centrifuges, used for nuclear enrichment, in Iran. This was an illegal act of war, according to the Defense Department’s own definition.

New Post has been published on http://www.kerrylcacho.com/?p=2301

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