U.S. Intelligence Community Must Rally Around Innovation
Technological threat to the U.S. intelligence community is a key issue govt., industry and academia must address, said former National Security Agency/Central Security Service Dir. Kenneth Minihan. Of U.S. technological preparedness, Minihan said he’s “not certain we have a full set of [golf] clubs in our bag.” American R&D superiority is fading and the U.S. routinely underperforms in technology development, heightening risks of traditional and cyber attacks on the U.S. information infrastructure, Minihan told the 4th Annual Govt. Convention on Emerging Technologies Wed. in Arlington, Va.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
Internet threats fall into several categories with which the intelligence community must contend, Minihan told Washington Internet Daily. Purposeful, illegal misuse is one, he said: “That’s a law enforcement issue and the technologies are by and large there for law enforcement to forensically find people who are misbehaving and catch them.” The 2nd type is a “purposeful adversary who has substantially more capability.” That’s the main challenge for industry, govt. and service providers, Minihan said: “We've had no real operational exercise which let all 3 see the dependencies together.” Enemies are “intending to take substantial advantage of our lack of attention to that,” he said.
Daunting work awaits, Minihan said. The effort should begin with a national exercise offering all parties a chance to examine vulnerabilities, as the Defense Dept. did with 1997’s Eligible Receiver program. That was the first large-scale, no-notice test of the nation’s response to an attack on the U.S. power and communications infrastructure. “After that, you had an well-informed leadership,” he noted. Minihan urged industry to push innovation in 2 ways: (1) The private sector should invest more in “wacky, far-out stuff” that could lead to technological breakthroughs. (2) Companies need to reestablish the pipeline that carries discoveries made in academia to industry.
Minihan, now principal at the Paladin Capital Group’s Homeland Security Fund, said the intelligence community is trying “to do the best they can with what they have,” but using infrastructure that is 10-15 years old. “Our people are still working in a technology ghetto,” he said, noting that existing systems can’t satisfy demands of the analytical and technological future: Today’s infrastructure lets enemies “hide in plain sight.” When it comes to secure technology, “we're playing soccer, not football,” he said. “We don’t have an offensive team and a defensive team. We don’t have information solutions to consider the vulnerability internally and externally [and] think about nature of the threat.” Minihan said the country’s adversaries are “pretty smart” and know the right technology is not yet on the table.