FOOD FOR THOUGHT: The National Security Threat in the Digital Revolution

NSA official says technology could upend U.S. national security infrastructure

 

An opinion piece on the New York Times website this week (September 10, 2019) sounds an alarm over the cyber threats posed by the digital revolution sweeping through all aspects of U.S. society.

Glenn S. Gerstell, general counsel of the National Security Agency (NSA), says it is “almost impossible to overstate the challenges” and “profound implications for our federal security agencies” that the general onrush of technology presents. The NSA leads the U.S. Government in cryptology, the study of codes — both creating and breaking them — which encompasses both signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance (or cybersecurity) products and services. The agency also enables computer network operations for the United States and its allies.

Unlike previous transformational technologies like railroads, electricity, radio and airplanes — which took decades to reach widespread use — cell phones, the Internet and social media have spread and shaped society in a time frame without precedent, Gerstell writes in his lengthy article.

(U.S. Navy photo by Ensign Crysta Gonzalez)

One example of the many challenges he cites is understanding how adversaries might use artificial intelligence (AI) in the future, including data poisoning — feeding misinformation to AI systems to corrupt or defeat them, such as causing a driverless vehicle to ignore a stop sign.  What are the implications for future autonomous weapons such as drones or armed robots? What are the protocols by which they will be controlled?

The sheer amount of data generated by individual and commercial activities will require enormous investments by the United States and its allies to upgrade national security and surveillance systems — perhaps much more than the roughly $60 billion the United States already spends annually on the intelligence community, which includes the FBI, CIA and a dozen other civilian and military agencies.

But it will take more than money to cope with unprecedented technological change, adapt to a world of continuous cyber conflict, navigate concepts of privacy and power that comes with access to big data, and to counter the effects of malign use of the Internet, according to Gerstell.

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Top photo: Mass Communications Specialist 2nd Class Sarah Villegas, U.S. Navy.

 

 

 

 

 

AFRICA: Global and Regional Threats Assessed in Somalia, Nigeria, the Sahel

Reason for Concern

Africa may have had some of the fastest growing economies in 2013, but the intelligence organizations that are the eyes and ears of the U.S. government, say several countries of the world’s second-largest, and second-most-populous continent are likely to experience unrest in 2014.

Last week the 17 government departments and agencies that make up the nation’s intelligence community, presented their annual assessment of global and regional threats confronting the United States and its friends and allies. They include terrorism, transnational crime, the proliferation of nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction, cyber threats, economic disruptions and potential shortages of natural resources from food and water to energy.

The 31-page unclassified summary of Senate testimony about their threat assessment also includes dangers facing several regions of the world. Here’s a look at the problems facing North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa:

“The continent has become a hothouse for the emergence of extremist and rebel groups, which increasingly launch deadly asymmetric attacks, and which government forces often cannot effectively counter due to a lack of capability and sometimes will,” the report states.

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The Sahel Region
(Wikipedia)

In the Sahel, the dry-scrub area bordering the Sahara Desert, the governments in Chad, Niger, Mali and Mauritania are at risk to terrorist retribution for their support of the January 2013 French-led international military intervention in Mali. But the region faces other pressures from a growing youth population and marginalized ethnic groups (like the Tuaregs of Mali) who are frustrated by a lack of government services, unemployment and poor living standards. Compounding the issue: corruption, illicit economies, smuggling and poor living standards.

Somalia in Africa
(CIA World Factbook)

In Somalia, which is just starting to climb back up from decades as a failed state, the young government is threatened by persistent political infighting, weak leadership from President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and ill-equipped government institutions. There’s another challenge, the increasingly violent al-Shabaab Islamist group which has been conducting asymmetric attacks against government facilities and Western targets in and around the capital Mogadishu.

Kenya in Africa. Map from CIA World Factbook

East African governments have beefed up their security and policing partnerships since the deadly al-Shabaab inspired attack last September on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya. But the IC folks think those governments will have difficulty protecting a wide range of potential targets. They told Congress that al-Shabaab-associated networks might be planning additional attacks in Kenya and throughout the region including Burundi, Djibouti, Ethiopia and Uganda to punish those troops that deployed troops to Somalia in support of its government.

Nigeria
(CIA World Factbook)

In Nigeria, rising political tensions and violent internal conflicts are likely in the lead-up to Nigeria’s 2015 election, according to the U.S. Intelligence community. Nigeria faces critical terrorism threats from the violent Islamist group Boko Haram and persistent extremism in the predominantly Muslim north where “economic stagnation and endemic poverty prevail amid insecurity and neglect.” In the oil-rich south, the economy centered on Lagos, is one of the fastest growing in the world. These disparities and domestic challenges could mean the waning of leadership from Africa’s most populous country (174.5 million) and possibly hurt its ability to deploy peacekeepers around the continent.

COUNTER TERRORISM: U.S. Facing Continued Terrorist, Overseas Stability Threats

Security Challenges

Official seals of members of the U.S. Intelligence Community
(ODNI photo via Wikipedia)

The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, and other leaders of the U.S. Intelligence community, known in Washington as the IC, were up on Capitol Hill this week to present their assessment of the global and regional threats facing the country.

But Clapper’s less-than-honest testimony before Congress last year about cell phone data collection seemed to gather most – but not all – of the news media attention – along with his continuing concerns about the disclosures of rogue National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

So 4GWAR would like to focus on the range of threats the IC – which includes the Office of National Intelligence, the NSA, CIA, FBI, NSA, Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Counterterrorism Center – believes are facing the United States as of January 15, 2014 (when their assessment report was completed).

Global threats listed by the 31-page public report include cyber attacks by hostile nations like Iran and North Korea, terrorist organizations and criminals; homegrown and international terrorist plots by groups like al-Qaeda branches like al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula; transnational organized criminal groups like the Mexican drug cartels that are expanding their influence across the Atlantic Ocean to West and North Africa.

“Competition for and secure access to natural resources (like food, water and energy) are growing security threats,” the report states. Risks to freshwater supplies are a growing threat to economic development in North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia and that could have a destabilizing effect not only on local economies but on governments and political institutions in many places where democracy is fragile or non-existent.

As polar ice recedes in the Arctic, “economic and security concerns will increase competition over access to sea routes and natural resources,” according to the report. Vast deposits of oil and natural gas – as much as 15 percent of the world’s undiscovered petroleum and 30 percent of its natural gas may lie beneath Arctic waters where the ice is receding more and more each year, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The report predicts Sub-Saharan Africa will “almost certainly see political and related security turmoil in 2014.” The continent has become “a hothouse for the emergence of extremist and rebel groups,” threatening governments in Chad, Niger, Mali and Mauritania.

National Operations Center
(Dept. of Homeland Security photo)

The report also notes the attacks in Somalia and East Africa by the extremist Islamic al-Shabaab movement as well as sharp ethnic/religious/economic divides that are causing death, destruction, starvation and and mass migration in Sudan, South Sudan, Nigeria, Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

4GWAR will have more on this report this weekend.