{"id":528493,"date":"2010-04-15T10:15:46","date_gmt":"2010-04-15T14:15:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/washingtonindependent.com\/?p=82345"},"modified":"2010-04-15T10:15:46","modified_gmt":"2010-04-15T14:15:46","slug":"likely-cyberwar-chief-wants-to-play-defense-not-so-much-offense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/528493","title":{"rendered":"Likely Cyberwar Chief Wants to Play Defense, Not So Much Offense"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander is up before the Senate Armed Services Committee this morning. (As I type, he&#8217;s giving his opening statement.) He&#8217;s the head of the National Security Agency and he&#8217;s been nominated to become the first-ever head of the military&#8217;s new Cyber Command. And he&#8217;s giving some indication he&#8217;s not going to focus, if confirmed, on attacking enemy cyber-infrastructure. His priority, he testified, will be on &#8220;building the capacity, capacity and critical partnerships required to build our operational networks. This command is not about efforts to militarize cyberspace.&#8221; He&#8217;ll remain, however, at NSA, and it&#8217;s unclear how that mix will work in practice.<span id=\"more-82345\"><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Over at Danger Room, Nathan Hodge <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/dangerroom\/2010\/04\/pentagons-prospective-cyber-commander-talks-terms-of-digital-warfare\/?utm_source=twitterfeed&amp;utm_medium=twitter#ixzz0lB3OA1yC\">reads through Alexander&#8217;s answers to prepared questions<\/a> and notices that Alexander indicated he doesn&#8217;t want to attack enemy civilian infrastructure. Nathan:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>[C]yber attacks threatened civilian networks and the financial system. It\u2019s unclear if the military could retaliate in kind. In a series of written answers to questions from senators (.pdf), Alexander said, \u201cIt is difficult for me to conceive of an instance where it would be appropriate to attack a bank or a financial institution, unless perhaps it was being used solely to support enemy military operations.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the committee chairman, referred to CYBERCOM representing &#8220;uncharted territory&#8221; for the military and the country. He asked how CYBERCOM would operate in support of a regional combatant commander during a military action. &#8220;We have standing rules of engagement of how to defend our networks,&#8221; Alexander said. So CYBERCOM operates in a defensive capability, it would seem. &#8220;We don&#8217;t have the authority to go into a third country to launch an attack,&#8221; Alexander continued, should an adversary route a cyberattack from the infrastructure of a country that isn&#8217;t party to a hypothetical conflict.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander is up before the Senate Armed Services Committee this morning. (As I type, he&#8217;s giving his opening statement.) He&#8217;s the head of the National Security Agency and he&#8217;s been nominated to become the first-ever head of the military&#8217;s new Cyber Command. And he&#8217;s giving some indication he&#8217;s not going to focus, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4314,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-528493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4314"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=528493"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528493\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=528493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=528493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=528493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}