In the wake of former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s warning of a possible “cyber Pearl Harbor,” the U.S. military is making every effort to prepare to defend against catastrophe in cyberspace. Anna Mulrine’s article, “Cyber Security: The new arms race for a new front line,” details some of the specific actions being taken by the U.S. Government. The article goes into a fair amount of detail, covering many more points than I offer here, and I invite you to read the full text. Here, I only offer an abbreviated account of some of her key themes:
- There has been a significant increase in U.S. military cyber operations and defense contractors in order to support cyber defense efforts. This boom brings on its own set of issues, including: (1) reliance on civilian contractors, such as Snowden, to fill large gaps in the number of “cyberwarriors” needed by the military; (2) questions over the proper role and scope of military efforts in domestic cyber security (as Steven Aftergood puts it “U.S. military agencies that have a tendency to expand their scope of activities, but never retreat”); and, (3) raised fiscal concerns and questions about the proper use of limited defense funds.
- The need for additional cyberwarriors means the need for a highly specialized and complex skillset. Mulrine questions the government’s ability to keep cyber talent in the public sector when high-paying firms are also looking to recruit.
- The military has employed an offensive as well as defensive scheme in response to cyber threat. To that end, Mulrine writes about the concerns some have expressed over teaching teenaged cadets how to hack and attack networks.
- The last of Mulrine’s points I’ll emphasize is about the private sector’s role in all of this. With the recent release of information tending to show the NSA secretly paid private domestic companies for clandestine access to their networks, Mulrine writes, there is a concern about turning “surveillance into a revenue stream” (to quote Marc Rotenburg). There is also the often-raised issue over hackback and the legality of companies striking back.
Again, you can find the full article here.
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