http://www.salon.com/2014/11/16/googles_secret_nsa_alliance_the_terrifying_deals_between_silicon_valley_and_the_security_state/



Nov 16, 2014 06:58 AM EST
Google’s secret NSA alliance: The terrifying deals between Silicon Valley
and the security state Inside the high-level, complicated deals -- and the
rise of a virtually unchecked surveillance power

Shane Harris <http://www.salon.com/writer/shane_harris/>

In mid-December 2009, engineers at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View,
California, began to suspect that hackers in China had obtained access to
private Gmail accounts, including those used by Chinese human rights
activists opposed to the government in Beijing.

Like a lot of large, well-known Internet companies, Google and its users
were frequently targeted by cyber spies and criminals. But when the
engineers looked more closely, they discovered that this was no ordinary
hacking campaign.

In what Google would later describe as “a highly sophisticated and targeted
attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China,” the thieves
were able to get access to the password system that allowed Google’s users
to sign in to many Google applications at once. This was some of the
company’s most important intellectual property, considered among the “crown
jewels” of its source code by its engineers. Google wanted concrete
evidence of the break-in that it could share with U.S. law enforcement and
intelligence authorities. So they traced the intrusion back to what they
believed was its source — a server in Taiwan where data was sent after it
was siphoned off Google’s systems, and that was presumably under the
control of hackers in mainland China.

“Google broke in to the server,” says a former senior intelligence official
who’s familiar with the company’s response. The decision wasn’t without
legal risk, according to the official. Was this a case of hacking back?
Just as there’s no law against a homeowner following a robber back to where
he lives, Google didn’t violate any laws by tracing the source of the
intrusion into its systems. It’s still unclear how the company’s
investigators gained access to the server, but once inside, if they had
removed or deleted data, that would cross a legal line. But Google didn’t
destroy what it found. In fact, the company did something unexpected and
unprecedented — it shared the information.

Google uncovered evidence of one of the most extensive and far-reaching
campaigns of cyber espionage in U.S. history. Evidence suggested that
Chinese hackers had penetrated the systems of nearly three dozen other
companies, including technology mainstays such as Symantec, Yahoo, and
Adobe, the defense contractor Northrop Grumman, and the equipment maker
Juniper Networks. The breadth of the campaign made it hard to discern a
single motive. Was this industrial espionage? Spying on human rights
activists? Was China trying to gain espionage footholds in key sectors of
the U.S. economy or, worse, implant malware in equipment used to regulate
critical infrastructure?
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The only things Google seemed certain of was that the campaign was massive
and persistent, and that China was behind it. And not just individual
hackers, but the Chinese government, which had the means and the motive to
launch such a broad assault.

Google shared what it found with the other targeted companies, as well as
U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies. For the past four years,
corporate executives had been quietly pressing government officials to go
public with information about Chinese spying, to shame the country into
stopping its campaign. But for President Obama or Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton to give a speech pointing the finger at China, they needed
indisputable evidence that attributed the attacks to sources in China. And
looking at what Google had provided it, government analysts were not sure
they had it. American officials decided the relationship between the two
economic superpowers was too fragile and the risk of conflict too high to
go public with what Google knew.

Google disagreed.

Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg was at a cocktail party in
Washington when an aide delivered an urgent message: Google was going to
issue a public statement about the Chinese spying campaign. Steinberg, the
second-highest-ranking official in U.S. foreign policy, immediately grasped
the significance of the company’s decision. Up to that moment, American
corporations had been unwilling to publicly accuse the Chinese of spying on
their networks or stealing their intellectual property. The companies
feared losing the confidence of investors and customers, inviting other
hackers to target their obviously weak defenses, and igniting the fury of
Chinese government officials, who could easily revoke access to one of the
biggest and fastest-growing markets for U.S. goods and services. For any
company to come out against China would be momentous. But for Google, the
most influential company of the Internet age, it was historic.

The next day, January 12, 2010, Google’s chief legal officer, David
Drummond, posted a lengthy statement to the company’s blog, accusing
hackers in China of attacking Google’s infrastructure and criticizing the
government for censoring Internet content and suppressing human rights
activists. “We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about
these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and
human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this
information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom
of speech,” said Drummond.

Back at the State Department, officials saw a rare opportunity to put
pressure on China for spying. That night Hillary Clinton issued her own
statement. “We have been briefed by Google on these allegations, which
raise very serious concerns and questions. We look to the Chinese
government for an explanation,” she said. “The ability to operate with
confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy.”

As diplomatic maneuvers go, this was pivotal. Google had just given the
Obama administration an opening to accuse China of espionage without having
to make the case itself. Officials could simply point to what Google had
discovered as a result of its own investigation.

“It gave us an opportunity to discuss the issues without having to rely on
classified sources or sensitive methods” of intelligence gathering,
Steinberg says. The administration had had little warning about Google’s
decision, and it was at odds with some officials’ reluctance to take the
espionage debate public. But now that it was, no one complained.

“It was their decision. I certainly had no objection,” Steinberg says.

The Obama administration began to take a harsher tone with China, starting
with a major address Clinton gave about her Internet Freedom initiative
nine days later. She called on China to stop censoring Internet searches
and blocking access to websites that printed criticism about the country’s
leaders. Clinton likened such virtual barriers to the Berlin Wall.

For its part, Google said it would stop filtering search results for words
and subjects banned by government censors. And if Beijing objected, Google
was prepared to pull up stakes and leave the Chinese market entirely,
losing out on billions of dollars in potential revenues. That put other
U.S. technology companies in the hot seat. Were they willing to put up with
government interference and suppression of free speech in order to keep
doing business in China?

After Google’s declaration, it was easier for other companies to admit
they’d been infiltrated by hackers. After all, if it happened to Google, it
could happen to anyone. Being spied on by the Chinese might even be a mark
of distinction, insofar as it showed that a company was important enough to
merit the close attention of a superpower. With one blog post, Google had
changed the global conversation about cyber defense.

The company had also shown that it knew a lot about Chinese spies. The NSA
wanted to know how much.

Google had also alerted the NSA and the FBI that its networks were breached
by hackers in China. As a law enforcement agency, the FBI could investigate
the intrusion as a criminal matter. But the NSA needed Google’s permission
to come in and help assess the breach.

On the day that Google’s lawyer wrote the blog post, the NSA’s general
counsel began drafting a “cooperative research and development agreement,”
a legal pact that was originally devised under a 1980 law to speed up the
commercial development of new technologies that are of mutual interest to
companies and the government. The agreement’s purpose is to build something
— a device or a technique, for instance. The participating company isn’t
paid, but it can rely on the government to front the research and
development costs, and it can use government personnel and facilities for
the research. Each side gets to keep the products of the collaboration
private until they choose to disclose them. In the end, the company has the
exclusive patent rights to build whatever was designed, and the government
can use any information that was generated during the collaboration.

It’s not clear what the NSA and Google built after the China hack. But a
spokeswoman at the agency gave hints at the time the agreement was written.
“As a general matter, as part of its information-assurance mission, NSA
works with a broad range of commercial partners and research associates to
ensure the availability of secure tailored solutions for Department of
Defense and national security systems customers,” she said. It was the
phrase “tailored solutions” that was so intriguing. That implied something
custom built for the agency, so that it could perform its
intelligence-gathering mission. According to officials who were privy to
the details of Google’s arrangements with the NSA, the company agreed to
provide information about traffic on its networks in exchange for
intelligence from the NSA about what it knew of foreign hackers. It was a
quid pro quo, information for information.

And from the NSA’s perspective, information in exchange for protection.

The cooperative agreement and reference to a “tailored solution” strongly
suggest that Google and the NSA built a device or a technique for
monitoring intrusions into the company’s networks. That would give the NSA
valuable information for its so-called active defense system, which uses a
combination of automated sensors and algorithms to detect malware or signs
of an imminent attack and take action against them. One system, called
Turmoil, detects traffic that might pose a threat. Then, another automated
system called Turbine decides whether to allow the traffic to pass or to
block it. Turbine can also select from a number of offensive software
programs and hacking techniques that a human operator can use to disable
the source of the malicious traffic. He might reset the source’s Internet
connection or redirect the traffic to a server under the NSA’s control.
There the source can be injected with a virus or spyware, so the NSA can
continue to monitor it.

For Turbine and Turmoil to work, the NSA needs information, particularly
about the data flowing over a network. With its millions of customers
around the world, Google is effectively a directory of people using the
Internet. It has their e-mail addresses. It knows where they’re physically
located when they log in. It knows what they search for on the web. The
government could command the company to turn over that information, and it
does as part of the NSA’s Prism program, which Google had been
participating in for a year by the time it signed the cooperative agreement
with the NSA. But that tool is used for investigating people whom the
government suspects of terrorism or espionage.

The NSA’s cyber defense mission takes a broader view across networks for
potential threats, sometimes before it knows who those threats are. Under
Google’s terms of service, the company advises its users that it may share
their “personal information” with outside organizations, including
government agencies, in order to “detect, prevent, or otherwise address
fraud, security or technical issues” and to “protect against harm to the
rights, property or safety of Google.” According to people familiar with
the NSA and Google’s arrangement, it does not give the government
permission to read Google users’ e-mails.

They can do that under Prism. Rather, it lets the NSA evaluate Google
hardware and software for vulnerabilities that hackers might exploit.
Considering that the NSA is the single biggest collector of zero day
vulnerabilities, that information would help make Google more secure than
others that don’t get access to such prized secrets. The agreement also
lets the agency analyze intrusions that have already occurred, so it can
help trace them back to their source.

Google took a risk forming an alliance with the NSA. The company’s
corporate motto, “Don’t be evil,” would seem at odds with the work of a
covert surveillance and cyber warfare agency. But Google got useful
information in return for its cooperation. Shortly after the China
revelation, the government gave Sergey Brin, Google’s cofounder, a
temporary security clearance that allowed him to attend a classified
briefing about the campaign against his company. Government analysts had
concluded that the intrusion was directed by a unit of the People’s
Liberation Army. This was the most specific information Google could obtain
about the source of the intrusion. It could help Google fortify its
systems, block traffic from certain Internet addresses, and make a more
informed decision about whether it wanted to do business in China at all.
Google’s executives might pooh-pooh the NSA’s “secret sauce.” But when the
company found itself under attack, it turned to Fort Meade for help.

In its blog post, Google said that more than twenty companies had been hit
by the China hackers, in a campaign that was later dubbed Aurora after a
file name on the attackers’ computer. A security research firm soon put the
number of targets at around three dozen. Actually, the scope of Chinese
spying was, and is, much larger.

Security experts in and outside of government have a name for the hackers
behind campaigns such as Aurora and others targeting thousands of other
companies in practically every sector of the U.S. economy: the advanced
persistent threat. It’s an ominous-sounding title, and a euphemistic one.
When government officials mention “APT” today, what they often mean is
China, and more specifically, hackers working at the direction of Chinese
military and intelligence officials or on their behalf.

The “advanced” part of the description refers in part to the hackers’
techniques, which are as effective as any the NSA employs. The Chinese
cyber spies can use an infected computer’s own chat and instant-messenger
applications to communicate with a command-and-control server. They can
implant a piece of malware and then remotely customize it, adding new
information-harvesting features. The government apparatus supporting all
this espionage is also advanced, more so than the loose-knit groups of
cyber vandals or activists such as Anonymous that spy on companies for
political purposes, or even the sophisticated Russian criminal groups, who
are more interested in stealing bank account and credit card data. China
plays a longer game. Its leaders want the country to become a first-tier
economic and industrial power in a single generation, and they are prepared
to steal the knowledge they need to do it, U.S. officials say.

That’s where the “persistent” part comes into play. Gathering that much
information, from so many sources, requires a relentless effort, and the
will and financial resources to try many different kinds of intrusion
techniques, including expensive zero day exploits. Once the spies find a
foothold inside an organization’s networks, they don’t let go unless
they’re forced out. And even then they quickly return. The “threat” such
spying poses to the U.S. economy takes the form of lost revenue and
strategic position. But also the risk that the Chinese military will gain
hidden entry points into critical-infrastructure control systems in the
United States. U.S. intelligence officials believe that the Chinese
military has mapped out infrastructure control networks so that if the two
nations ever went to war, the Chinese could hit American targets such as
electrical grids or gas pipelines without having to launch a missile or
send a fleet of bombers.

Operation Aurora was the first glimpse into the breadth of the ATP’s
exploits. It was the first time that names of companies had been attached
to Chinese espionage. “The scope of this is much larger than anybody has
ever conveyed,” Kevin Mandia, CEO and president of Mandiant, a computer
security and forensics company located outside Washington, said at the time
of Operation Aurora. The APT represented hacking on a national, strategic
level. “There [are] not 50 companies compromised. There are thousands of
companies compromised. Actively, right now,” said Mandia, a veteran cyber
investigator who began his career as a computer security officer in the air
force and worked there on cybercrime cases. Mandiant was becoming a goto
outfit that companies called whenever they discovered spies had penetrated
their networks. Shortly after the Google breach, Mandiant disclosed the
details of its investigations in a private meeting with Defense Department
officials a few days before speaking publicly about it.

The APT is not one body but a collection of hacker groups that include
teams working for the People’s Liberation Army, as well as so-called
patriotic hackers, young, enterprising geeks who are willing to ply their
trade in service of their country. Chinese universities are also stocked
with computer science students who work for the military after graduation.
The APT hackers put a premium on stealth and patience. They use zero days
and install backdoors. They take time to identify employees in a targeted
organization, and send them carefully crafted spear-phishing e-mails laden
with spyware. They burrow into an organization, and they often stay there
for months or years before anyone finds them, all the while siphoning off
plans and designs, reading e-mails and their attachments, and keeping tabs
on the comings and goings of employees — the hackers’ future targets. The
Chinese spies behave, in other words, like their American counterparts.

No intelligence organization can survive if it doesn’t know its enemy. As
expansive as the NSA’s network of sensors is, it’s sometimes easier to get
precise intelligence about hacking campaigns from the targets themselves.
That’s why the NSA partnered with Google. It’s why when Mandiant came
calling with intelligence on the APT, officials listened to what the
private sleuths had to say. Defending cyberspace is too big a job even for
the world’s elite spy agency. Whether they like it or not, the NSA and
corporations must fight this foe together.

Google’s Sergey Brin is just one of hundreds of CEOs who have been brought
into the NSA’s circle of secrecy. Starting in 2008, the agency began
offering executives temporary security clearances, some good for only one
day, so they could sit in on classified threat briefings.

“They indoctrinate someone for a day, and show them lots of juicy
intelligence about threats facing businesses in the United States,” says a
telecommunications company executive who has attended several of the
briefings, which are held about three times a year. The CEOs are required
to sign an agreement pledging not to disclose anything they learn in the
briefings. “They tell them, in so many words, if you violate this
agreement, you will be tried, convicted, and spend the rest of your life in
prison,” says the executive.

Why would anyone agree to such severe terms? “For one day, they get to be
special and see things few others do,” says the telecom executive, who,
thanks to having worked regularly on classified projects, holds high-level
clearances and has been given access to some of the NSA’s most sensitive
operations, including the warrantless surveillance program that began after
the 9/11 attacks. “Alexander became personal friends with many CEOs”
through these closed-door sessions, the executive adds. “I’ve sat through
some of these and said, ‘General, you tell these guys things that could put
our country in danger if they leak out.’ And he said, ‘I know. But that’s
the risk we take. And if it does leak out, they know what the consequences
will be.’ ”

But the NSA doesn’t have to threaten the executives to get their attention.
The agency’s revelations about stolen data and hostile intrusions are
frightening in their own right, and deliberately so. “We scare the bejeezus
out of them,” a government official told National Public Radio in 2012.
Some of those executives have stepped out of their threat briefings meeting
feeling like the defense contractor CEOs who, back in the summer of 2007,
left the Pentagon with “white hair.”

Unsure how to protect themselves, some CEOs will call private security
companies such as Mandiant. “I personally know of one CEO for whom [a
private NSA threat briefing] was a life-changing experience,” Richard
Bejtlich, Mandiant’s chief security officer, told NPR. “General Alexander
sat him down and told him what was going on. This particular CEO, in my
opinion, should have known about [threats to his company] but did not, and
now it has colored everything about the way he thinks about this problem.”

The NSA and private security companies have a symbiotic relationship. The
government scares the CEOs and they run for help to experts such as
Mandiant. Those companies, in turn, share what they learn during their
investigations with the government, as Mandiant did after the Google breach
in 2010. The NSA has also used the classified threat briefings to spur
companies to strengthen their defenses.

In one 2010 session, agency officials said they’d discovered a flaw in
personal computer firmware — the onboard memory and codes that tell the
machine how to work — that could allow a hacker to turn the computer “into
a brick,” rendering it useless. The CEOs of computer manufacturers who
attended the meeting, and who were previously aware of the design flaw,
ordered it fixed.

Private high-level meetings are just one way the NSA has forged alliances
with corporations. Several classified programs allow companies to share the
designs of their products with the agency so it can inspect them for flaws
and, in some instances, install backdoors or other forms of privileged
access. The types of companies that have shown the NSA their products
include computer, server, and router manufacturers; makers of popular
software products, including Microsoft; Internet and e-mail service
providers; telecommunications companies; satellite manufacturers; antivirus
and Internet security companies; and makers of encryption algorithms.

The NSA helps the companies find weaknesses in their products. But it also
pays the companies not to fix some of them. Those weak spots give the
agency an entry point for spying or attacking foreign governments that
install the products in their intelligence agencies, their militaries, and
their critical infrastructure. Microsoft, for instance, shares zero day
vulnerabilities in its products with the NSA before releasing a public
alert or a software patch, according to the company and U.S. officials.
Cisco, one of the world’s top network equipment makers, leaves backdoors in
its routers so they can be monitored by U.S. agencies, according to a cyber
security professional who trains NSA employees in defensive techniques. And
McAfee, the Internet security company, provides the NSA, the CIA, and the
FBI with network traffic flows, analysis of malware, and information about
hacking trends.

Companies that promise to disclose holes in their products only to the spy
agencies are paid for their silence, say experts and officials who are
familiar with the arrangements. To an extent, these openings for government
surveillance are required by law. Telecommunications companies in
particular must build their equipment in such a way that it can be tapped
by a law enforcement agency presenting a court order, like for a wiretap.
But when the NSA is gathering intelligence abroad, it is not bound by the
same laws. Indeed, the surveillance it conducts via backdoors and secret
flaws in hardware and software would be illegal in most of the countries
where it occurs.

Of course, backdoors and unpatched flaws could also be used by hackers. In
2010 a researcher at IBM publicly revealed a flaw in a Cisco operating
system that allows a hacker to use a backdoor that was supposed to be
available only to law enforcement agencies. The intruder could hijack the
Cisco device and use it to spy on all communications passing through it,
including the content of e-mails. Leaving products vulnerable to attack,
particularly ubiquitous software programs like those produced by Microsoft,
puts millions of customers and their private information at risk and
jeopardizes the security of electrical power facilities, public utilities,
and transportation systems.

Under U.S. law, a company’s CEO is required to be notified whenever the
government uses its products, services, or facilities for
intelligence-gathering purposes. Some of these information-sharing
arrangements are brokered by the CEOs themselves and may be reviewed only
by a few lawyers. The benefits of such cooperation can be profound. John
Chambers, the CEO of Cisco, became friends with George W. Bush when he was
in office. In April 2006, Chambers and the president ate lunch together at
the White House with Chinese president Hu Jintao, and the next day Bush
gave Chambers a lift on *Air Force One *to San Jose, where the president
joined the CEO at Cisco headquarters for a panel discussion on American
business competitiveness. California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger also
joined the conversation. Proximity to political power is its own reward.
But preferred companies also sometimes receive early warnings from the
government about threats against them.

The Homeland Security Department also conducts meetings with companies
through its “cross sector working groups” initiative. These sessions are a
chance for representatives from the universe of companies with which the
government shares intelligence to meet with one another and hear from U.S.
officials. The attendees at these meetings often have security clearances
and have undergone background checks and interviews. The department has
made the schedule and agendas of some of these meetings public, but it
doesn’t disclose the names of companies that participated or many details
about what they discussed.

Between January 2010 and October 2013, the period for which public records
are available, the government held at least 168 meetings with companies
just in the cross sector working group. There have been hundreds more
meetings broken out by specific industry categories, such as energy,
telecommunications, and transportation.

A typical meeting may include a “threat briefing” by a U.S. government
official, usually from the NSA, the FBI, or the Homeland Security
Department; updates on specific initiatives, such as enhancing bank website
security, improving information sharing among utility companies, or
countering malware; and discussion of security “tools” that have been
developed by the government and industry, such as those used to detect
intruders on a network. One meeting in April 2012 addressed “use cases for
enabling information sharing for active cyber defense,” the NSA-pioneered
process of disabling cyber threats before they can do damage. The
information sharing in this case was not among government agencies but
among corporations.

Most meetings have dealt with protecting industrial control systems, the
Internet-connected devices that regulate electrical power equipment,
nuclear reactors, banks, and other vital facilities. That’s the weakness in
U.S. cyberspace that most worries intelligence officials. It was the
subject that so animated George W. Bush in 2007 and that Barack Obama
addressed publicly two years later. The declassified agendas for these
meetings offer a glimpse at what companies and the government are building
for domestic cyber defense.

On September 23, 2013, the Cross Sector Enduring Security Framework
Operations Working Group discussed an update to an initiative described as
“Connect Tier 1 and USG Operations Center.” “Tier 1” usually refers to a
major Internet service provider or network operator. Some of the best-known
Tier 1 companies in the United States are AT&T, Verizon, and CenturyLink.
“USG” refers to the U.S. government. The initiative likely refers to a
physical connection running from an NSA facility to those companies, as
part of an expansion of the DIB pilot program. The expansion was authorized
by a presidential executive order in February 2013 aimed at increasing
security of critical-infrastructure sites around the country. The
government, mainly through the NSA, gives threat intelligence to two
Internet service providers, AT&T and CenturyLink. They, in turn, can sell
“enhanced cybersecurity services,” as the program is known, to companies
that the government deems vital to national and economic security. The
program is nominally run by the Homeland Security Department, but the NSA
provides the intelligence and the technical expertise.

Through this exchange of intelligence, the government has created a cyber
security business. AT&T and CenturyLink are in effect its private sentries,
selling protection to select corporations and industries. AT&T has one of
the longest histories of any company participating in government
surveillance. It was among the first firms that voluntarily handed over
call records of its customers to the NSA following the 9/11 attacks, so the
agency could mine them for potential connections to terrorists — a program
that continues to this day. Most phone calls in the United States pass
through AT&T equipment at some point, regardless of which carrier initiates
them. The company’s infrastructure is one of the most important and
frequently tapped repositories of electronic intelligence for the NSA and
U.S. law enforcement agencies.

CenturyLink, which has its headquarters in Monroe, Louisiana, has been a
less familiar name in intelligence circles over the years. But in 2011 the
company acquired Qwest Communications, a telecommunications firm that is
well known to the NSA. Before the 9/11 attacks, NSA officials approached
Qwest executives and asked for access to its high-speed fiber-optic
networks, in order to monitor them for potential cyber attacks. The company
rebuffed the agency’s requests because officials hadn’t obtained a court
order to get access to the company’s equipment. After the terrorist
attacks, NSA officials again came calling, asking Qwest to hand over its
customers’ phone records without a court-approved warrant, as AT&T had
done. Again, the company refused. It took another ten years and the sale of
the company, but Qwest’s networks are now a part of the NSA’s extended
security apparatus.

The potential customer base for government-supplied cyber intelligence,
sold through corporations, is as diverse as the U.S. economy itself. To
obtain the information, a company must meet the government’s definition of
a critical infrastructure: “assets, systems, and networks, whether physical
or virtual, so vital to the United States that their incapacitation or
destruction would have a debilitating effect on security, national economic
security, national public health or safety, or any combination thereof.”
That may seem like a narrow definition, but the categories of critical
infrastructure are numerous and vast, encompassing thousands of businesses.
Officially, there are sixteen sectors: chemical; commercial facilities, to
include shopping centers, sports venues, casinos, and theme parks;
communications; critical manufacturing; dams; the defense industrial base;
emergency services, such as first responders and search and rescue; energy;
financial services; food and agriculture; government facilities; health
care and public health; information technology; nuclear reactors,
materials, and waste; transportation systems; and water and wastewater
systems.

It’s inconceivable that every company on such a list could be considered
“so vital to the United States” that its damage or loss would harm national
security and public safety. And yet, in the years since the 9/11 attacks,
the government has cast such a wide protective net that practically any
company could claim to be a critical infrastructure. The government doesn’t
disclose which companies are receiving cyber threat intelligence. And as of
now the program is voluntary. But lawmakers and some intelligence
officials, including Keith Alexander and others at the NSA, have pressed
Congress to regulate the cyber security standards of
critical-infrastructure owners and operators. If that were to happen, then
the government could require that any company, from Pacific Gas and
Electric to Harrah’s Hotels and Casinos, take the government’s assistance,
share information about its customers with the intelligence agencies, and
build its cyber defenses according to government specifications.

In a speech in 2013 the Pentagon’s chief cyber security adviser, Major
General John Davis, announced that Homeland Security and the Defense
Department were working together on a plan to expand the original DIB
program to more sectors. They would start with energy, transportation, and
oil and natural gas, “things that are critical to DOD’s mission and the
nation’s economic and national security that we do not directly control,”
Davis said. The general called foreign hackers’ mapping of these systems
and potential attacks “an imminent threat.” The government will never be
able to manage such an extensive security regime on its own. It can’t now,
which is why it relies on AT&T and CenturyLink. More companies will flock
to this new mission as the government expands the cyber perimeter. The
potential market for cyber security services is practically limitless.

*Excerpted from &#8220;@WAR: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex”
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0544251792/?tag=saloncom08-20> by Shane Harris.
Copyright © 2014 by Shane Harris. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.*

Shane Harris is the author of The Watchers: The Rise of America's
Surveillance State, which won the New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein
Book Award for Excellence in Journalism and was named one of the best books
of 2010 by the Economist. Harris won the 2010 Gerald R. Ford Prize for
Distinguished Reporting on National Defense. He is currently senior writer
at Foreign Policy magazine and an ASU fellow at the New America Foundation,
where he researches the future of war.




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