U.S. Spy Chief: Cyberspace Is Potential Battlefield

[William Knowles <wk () C4I ORG>]

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/htx/nm/20001016/wr/internet_security_dc_1.html

Monday October 16 2:52 PM ET
By Jim Wolf

BALTIMORE (Reuters) - The head of the super-secret U.S. National
Security Agency (NSA) said on Monday that cyberspace had become as
important a potential battlefield as any other and held out the
prospect of attacking there as well as defending.

``Information is now a place,'' Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden told
a major computer security conference here. ``It is a place where we
must ensure American security as surely as ... and, sea, air and
space.''

He cited moves to define the ``legal structure into which we must
fit'' before offensive ``information operations'' -- cyberattacks --
were officially added to the arsenal that U.S. commanders can use
against a foe. The NSA is the Defense Department arm that intercepts
communications worldwide.

The world of information ``has taken on a dimension within which we
will conduct operations to ensure American security,'' Hayden said,
adding that the NSA had not been authorized to do ''that attack
thing,'' or go on the offensive in cyberspace.

``But as the United States government begins to think about what it
should or wants to do when it is under attack, it raises a really
interesting question that we all have to work through in the context
of our overall democracy,'' he said.

A year ago Army Gen. Henry Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, disclosed that the United States tried to mount electronic
attacks on Serbian computer networks during the NATO air campaign over
the province of Kosovo.

``We only used our capability to a very limited degree,'' Shelton told
reporters at the time.

Hayden said a key challenge to the NSA today was to protect
U.S. telecommunications in a world where the adversaries might be
``cyberterrorists, a malicious hacker or even a non-malicious
hacker.''

``All can cause great harm'' to the networked systems that tie the
industrialized world together, he told the conference co-sponsored by
the NSA and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an arm
of the Commerce Department. Hayden said the NSA, the Pentagon's
code-making and code-breaking agency, was committed to developing its
partnerships with industry to boost computer network security.

``We've done pioneering work to better protect e-commerce'' as well as
to develop biometrics, ways in which computers authenticate identities
from unique traits such as fingerprints, iris scans and voice
recognition, he said.

Ultimately the NSA must become the ``security statement'' of the
U.S. telecommunications and computer industries, just as he views the
Air Force as the ``military statement'' of the aviation industry, he
said.

``How else does our society develop the tools we need to do what it is
that our agency has been charged to do?'' he asked. The NSA designs
codes to protect the integrity of U.S. information systems and
searches for weaknesses in foes' systems and codes.


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"Communications without intelligence is noise;  Intelligence
without communications is irrelevant." Gen Alfred. M. Gray, USMC
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