By Dr. Joseph Campos
Program Director, Intelligence Studies at American Military University
The internet is the newest international battleground. Security and intelligence in the cyber world needs to constantly be at the forefront of thinking, ever watchful and always progressive, pushing the boundaries of possibilities in order to ensure that information is protected.
In the February 12, 2013 State of the Union address, President Obama stated that “we know foreign countries and companies swipe our corporate secrets. Now our enemies are also seeking the ability to sabotage our power grid, our financial institutions, our air traffic control systems.”
One week later, on February 19, 2013, the NBC Evening News reported on recent cyber-attacks from Chinese hackers that targeted 141 major U.S. companies. More importantly, however, the attacks are alleged to come from a branch of the Chinese military, Unit 61398, known as the cyber warriors.
It is imperative to realize that this is not a new phenomenon. The Stuxnet computer worm alleged to be created by U.S. and Israeli government sources, discovered in June 2010, crippled Iran’s nuclear facilities. The difference here is that if the U.S. and Israeli governments were behind Stuxnet then the impetus was based on national security. The purported actions of Unit 61398 are primarily the benefit of the private sector through possible attainment of trade secrets and other proprietary information. What should be most disconcerting to national security interests is exactly what was echoed in President Obama’s 2013 State of the Union Address. If states can infiltrate private sector industry that puts the full weight of their resources to protect information and proprietary information, then likewise government entities need to be vigilant in guarding their infrastructure that rely on cyber mechanisms.
This is why it is so important that the intelligence community continue to push for more resources (funding, personnel, and technology) in the development of cutting edge and creative thinking when it comes to cyber security and intelligence. Cyber security and intelligence efforts must also balance privacy and intelligence, ethics and intelligence, and security and intelligence, to just name a few issues. Education programs like American Military University’s concentration on cyber intelligence and security that provide students the tools to develop competencies in collection, analysis, and counterattacking digital security threats to support the skills needed in the cyber intelligence field.
About the Author:
Dr. Joseph Campos is an Associate Professor and Program Director of the Intelligence Studies Program at APUS. He is the author of “The State and Terrorism: National Security Discourse and the Mobilization of Power”, 2007. His research lies in state’s discursive maneuvers that are used to inscribe and prescribe specific agency to issues and events. As well as, how the state constructs imagined states of relevance that are the convergence of knowledge, powers, histories, institutions, and agents. It is in the convergence of these categories that a practice of statecraft is revealed. Once constructed, an issue’s relevance is consistently articulated and re-articulated, produced and re-produced for the consumption of the citizenry.
Comments are closed.