There was a discussion this week about the fact that terrorists were now communicating on what is called a dark network. This seems to mean that they can avoid surveillance by using encrypted files that are unbreakable by our security entities. For some reason the discussion, led by Sean Henry, former head of cyber security for the FBI
went offline when he moved it over to deal with the intelligence community’s pet peeve, the problems they are having with the privacy issue. This is pure intelligence community cover-up; the problem they create to mask their deffiencies.
The problem is completely tech oriented. The privacy issue should never enter the discussion because the privacy issue has to do with surveillance of American’s phones and the issue under discussion is about foreign entities sending communication into this country from outside our borders. One thing has nothing to do with the other; the security people are just trying to cloud their failures.
All the security tools being applied in the fight against ISIS are being developed by the military industrial complex. There are billions of dollars at stake so it’s imperative that everyone calls a spade a spade. The problem is that we have wasted so much money on blatant failures like the F35 non-functioning plane and tens of thousands of tanks that went directly from factory to mothballs that we haven’t spent anywhere near enough on our cyber weapons, which, after all, represent the war of the present and future. Sure those planes that don’t fly and tanks that are now buried in the desert sand represent thousands of American jobs but how about employing these people in jobs that actually make something useful.
The problem is we can’t seem to stop a bunch of sand rats like ISIS from communicating with their sympathizers here, and we can’t keep China from hacking into our government records. This is an unmitigated disgrace and everyone running the detection system should be replaced. This is a failure of command. Starting with all those fancy uniforms in the Pentagon and continuing down through all the commanders of our intelligence agencies, who have been wrong about just about everything since WWII. We should clean house!
Maybe putting techies in charge instead of politicians who are only protecting their turf and their jobs is the answer. Unfortunately Henry goes back to the privacy versus technology battle, which is really irrelevant. Government people don’t want to disconnect the lack of tech progress from the privacy problem because the phony privacy issue, gives them a great excuse for their tech failures.
During another discussion of cyber terrorism, Richard Clark former advisor to four presidents on security matters blames Obama for the sad state of our $8 billion cyber security system. He may be right but where was he in all this? He has advised the last four presidents and it doesn’t seem that someone with his extensive knowledge of the nations security problems and non-solutions has made any progress in the matter either. He did suggest that the government take all the little agencies that are not able, on their own, to deal with the enormity of the problem, and meld them into one massive cyber terror agency that maybe could get ahead of the problem. Great! Then we’ll have two Homeland Security Agencies that can’t get it done, instead of one.
What is clear is that we are spending massive amounts of money and being beaten to the punch by the Chinese, and just about any other competent hacker that wants to invade our system. It is inconceivable that after spending $80 billion we can’t keep a bunch of third world crazies, running around the desert in jeeps, from communicating with their sympathizers around the world, or that we can’t intercept their transmissions. It would seem that the government has been hiring bean farmers from the delta to run our cyber programs.
This column doesn’t often support Rand Paul but in his argument with Chris Christie during the debates he was spot on. What Christie didn’t seem to understand and what Paul for some reason didn’t state, is that we have more than enough surveillance of the American people, but what we don’t seem to have is functioning use of the intelligence which that surveillance obtains. The Boston bombers were already on the FBI’s radar, the guy who shot up the base in Tennessee was already there too, but the follow-ups on both were non-existent. These events happened, not because the NSA wasn’t looking into enough bathroom mirrors, but because the agencies to which they gave the information they gathered, didn’t do their jobs. Hell, we already had information on the guys who did 911 but we didn’t follow up on it either.
The security agencies already have more than enough ability to look into your underwear drawer, what they don’t have is efficient and/or intelligent investigators who can deal with the information they already have. A huge part of that is caused by the way that the FBI, the CIA and other investigative agencies work. They are bureaucracies that suppress employee initiative instead of supporting it. Agents are not encouraged to be inventive in their pursuit of criminals and terrorists but instead, to toe the agency party line and not do anything that might rock the boat of agency funding.
This is not the way to succeed in intelligence work or anything else. This is exactly why we didn’t stop 911, didn’t know about the failure of the USSR until the Germans started tearing down the wall, didn’t know about so much else that has gone against us in the world. If Wild Bill Donavan ran the OSS like his successors run the CIA and our other intelligence operations, we’d all be speaking German or Japanese now.