The Defense Department is making heavy cuts in the uncertain budget environment, but it is investing in cyber teams and initiatives to tackle a problem brought into stark relief by National Security Agency (NSA) leaker Edward Snowdon–the critical importance of information, the deputy secretary of Defense said.
“Job one for us has to be defending our own networks,” Ashton Carter said at the Aspen Security Forum yesterday. The fact that Snowden was able to find and release data was a “failure,” he said, particularly since it was an insider not an outsider.
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| Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter Photo DoD |
While the assessment is still under way, the damage was “substantial,” Carter said.
The failure resulted from two factors, he said. First, there was an enormous amount of information concentrated in one place. “That’s a mistake,” he said. Secondly, one individual was given substantial authority to access and move that information.
“We’re acting to reverse both of those things,” he said.
Information has to be compartmentalized more rigidly and processes have to be in place, as they are around nuclear weapons. For example, there’s a red line keeping people away from nuclear weapons. If they cross it, they’ll be shot, Carter said. There’s also the two people rule around nuclear weapons. In the Snowden case, one person at one installation could access and move information.
A cyber initiative under way now is expected to wind up with a total of about 4,000 people divided into some 40 teams, 27 working cyber defense, and 13 working cyber offense.
The teams are “almost up and running,” he said. “We’re drawing people in from the services that we already have….I want to start fast.”
The people required are hard to find and mature, he said. The initiative is based on people with existing talent and experience while DoD finds and slowly matures the people it needs.
Defending military networks is the most important, he said. “Everything we do depends on the use of information systems including ones that are connected to the internet.”
A decade ago, he pointed out, networks could be found mostly at brigade level, now there are eight to 10 displays at the company, where units chat with other units around them, get satellite feeds and data from others.
“If we lose that, it’s not good,” Carter said.
Another part of the initiative is to develop and deploy and do intelligence preparation for DoD cyber capabilities to nullify the cyber advantage on the part of others. “We try to do it lawfully and in a way the population can support and is consistent with our values,” he said.
There are tricky things associated with that, he said, for example privacy, and examining if a particular action you take with an enemy’s information system will only have consequences for their air defense system. Some of this takes authorities that DoD is working through.
DoD also plays a role in supporting the Department of Homeland Security and law enforcement. The principal support is through NSA, which he manages, Carter said. That’s where the 40 new teams will be situated. They will be in addition to NSA’s existing cyber workforce that is mostly oriented to cyber intelligence collection.
Carter warned that many civil networks are poorly protected, which leads to a larger societal problem: “cyber security is underinvested, there’s a market failure in cyber security,” he said. A lot of critical businesses are more vulnerable than they should be and they should take steps to protect themselves rather than the government rendering aid.