infosec4all.com

January 21, 2008 issue of The New Yorker brings a quite lengthy interview with Mike McConnell, new director of National Intelligence. Unfortunately, full article is not available online, only an audio interview with the author Lawrence Wright.

The author talks with McConnell’s about his career, his days as NSA director, and evolution of national infosec caused by modern technologies:

“When I went there in ’92 the Internet existed – it was called Arpanet – but the World Wide Web did not, [...] Then the Web made the Internet accessible for everybody. My world exploded.”

The article provides some insight in how the intelligence community adopts new technologies:

” In 2006, the community adopted Intellipedia, a secure version of Wikipeda. Blogging is now permitted on internal servers, [...] there is a new “A-Space” based on sites such as MySpace and Facebook where analysts post their current projects as a way of creating social networks.” [...] “Much of the intelligence community is technophobic and is also hamstrung by security concerns. Only recently have BlackBerrys made their way into some agencies, and many offices don’t even have Internet connections.”

Wright and McConnell also discuss how recent development in communication technologies rendered Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 inadequate and how privacy concerns impede its timely update.

The most interesting part of the article talks about infosec problems intelligence community faces at national level and proposed solutions:

“At NSA, McConnell set up a new office to conduct information warfare against potential enemies, but he eventually realized that America, with its huge computer networks, was far more vulnerable to such attacks than its adversaries.” [...]

“Practically nothing was being done to secure American computer networks, which the entire world routinely depended upon.” [...] “There are forty thousand Chinese hackers who are collecting intelligence off US information systems and those of our partners. how many of them can read English? Almost every one of them. if you ask how many intelligence-gathering people are doing similar things in Mike’s cast empire, the answer would be tiny. And you won’t find any who understand Mandarin. We should never get into a hacking war with the Chinese.”

“[...] he describes the three aspects of information warfare operations. Computer-network exploitation – that is, the theft of manipulation of information – is done by the NSA. Computer-network attacks are the province of the Department of Defense. The third element, computer-network defense, was not the specialty of any agency.” [...]“If the 9/11 perpetrators had focused on a single US bank through cyber-attack and it had been successful, it would have an order-of-magnitude greater impact on the US economy.”[...]

“One proposal of McConnell’s Cyber Security Policy, which is still in draft stage, is to reduce the access points between government computers and the Internet from two thousand to fifty.”