Senators probe NSA-chief pick

Nominee says cyberwarfare on upswing, U.S. vulnerable

“It’s only a matter of time, I believe, before we start to see more destructive activity” against computer systems, Vice Adm. Michael Rogers told senators Tuesday.
“It’s only a matter of time, I believe, before we start to see more destructive activity” against computer systems, Vice Adm. Michael Rogers told senators Tuesday.

WASHINGTON - Vice Adm. Michael Rogers, President Barack Obama’s nominee to run the National Security Agency, told a Senate committee Tuesday that he had seen evidence of broad cyber attacks on the new Ukraine government, but he declined to say whether the Russian government was the source, or how much damage the attacks had done.


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“We see it today in Ukraine,” Rogers, who heads the Navy’s Fleet Cyber Command, said of the cyber attacks. Asked if he expected the government of President Vladimir Putin to increase attacks on the Ukrainian government, he said that “clearly cyber will be an element of every crisis we see in the future,” citing past Russian attacks on Georgia and Estonia.

Rogers was cautious in what he said in the hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, which reviews his nomination because Rogers would also be heading U.S. Cyber Command, the joint military command responsible for both offensive and defensive cyberspace operations.

He promised that the National Security Agency’s programs, including its domestic surveillance activities, would become “more transparent,” and said he would “assure a sense of accountability” for the agency’s activities.

But he declined to be specific about how he might change the collection of telephone metadata or other information about the communications of Americans, other than to say that he had concerns that if the U.S. did not keep the data itself, it could slow the agency’s ability to search for links to suspected terrorists.

At another point in the hearing, Rogers said he believed that the Defense Department and U.S. government computer systems in general are vulnerable to major attacks and will be until “a new architecture” is in place to defend them.

“It’s only a matter of time, I believe, before we start to see more destructive activity,” he said.

For the National Security Agency, 2013 was a tough year.

It started with Edward Snowden’s leaks of stolen National Security Agency documents and ended with a Christmas-season letter to families of agency employees declaring that despite what everyone was hearing on television and reading in the papers, their relatives were heroes, not violators of privacy rights.

Since then, Obama has moved from lukewarm defenses of the agency’s programs to embracing recommendations to take the bulk collection of telephone call records out of the agency’s hands.

Google and Yahoo have said they are equipping themselves with new technologies designed to defeat agency interception, and the general counsel of Microsoft said, “government snooping potentially now constitutes an ‘advanced persistent threat,’” a phrase normally used to describe China’s most sophisticated hackers.

To stop leakers, the agency plans to step up its monitoring of calls, emails and financial transactions of agency employees, a move the agency’s privacy critics find particularly rich in irony.

Friends of Rogers in the intelligence community, who have worked with him in his current job running the Fleet Cyber Command, said they wonder whether knows he is wading into.

“Why would anyone in his right mind be director of NSA right now?” asked John Schindler, a former agency officer who is now a professor at the Naval War College. “It’s a massive political headache.”

“Rogers is taking over what they call in the Navy an ‘unhappy ship,’” he said.

The question resonating inside the agency recently is whether Rogers is prepared to become the public face - and public defender - of the agency, a job his predecessor, Gen. Keith Alexander, took on with gusto.

Just last week, Alexander was at Georgetown University, defending the agency’s programs, arguing that the Snowden disclosures had weakened U.S. cyber defenses, and gently mocking how much oversight the agency receives.

“We’re reviewed by the general counsel and the inspector general” of the Departments of Defense, the director of national intelligence, the White House, Congress and many others, he said, giving a taste of how many minders Rogers will have to face.

Front Section, Pages 7 on 03/12/2014

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