Cyber Security Initiative is Too Secret, SASC Says
The new National Cyber Security Initiative that is intended to reduce the vulnerability of government information networks and to devise an information warfare doctrine is so highly classified that it is undermining the deterrent value of the project, the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) said in a new report.
“It is difficult to conceive how the United States could promulgate a meaningful [information warfare] deterrence doctrine if every aspect of our capabilities and operational concepts is classified,” the Senate report said.
During the cold war, “deterrence was not possible without letting friends and adversaries alike know what capabilities we possessed and the price that adversaries would pay in a real conflict. Some analogous level of disclosure is necessary in the cyber domain.”
(Or, as Dr. Strangelove put it 40 years ago, “The whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret!”)
As things stand, the Senate report said, “virtually everything about the [cyber security] initiative is highly classified, and most of the information that is not classified is categorized as ‘For Official Use Only’.”
“These restrictions preclude public education, awareness, and debate about the policy and legal issues, real or imagined, that the initiative poses in the areas of privacy and civil liberties.”
“The committee strongly urges the administration to reconsider the necessity and wisdom of the blanket, indiscriminate classification levels established for the initiative.”
The committee’s remarks on the National Cyber Security Initiative were published in its report on the 2009 defense authorization act, excerpted here.
With targeted policy interventions, we can efficiently and effectively support the U.S. innovation economy through the translation of breakthrough scientific research from the lab to the market.
Crowd forecasting methods offer a systematic approach to quantifying the U.S. intelligence community’s uncertainty about the future and predicting the impact of interventions, allowing decision-makers to strategize effectively and allocate resources by outlining risks and tradeoffs in a legible format.
The energy transition underway in the United States continues to present a unique set of opportunities to put Americans back to work through the deployment of new technologies, infrastructure, energy efficiency, and expansion of the electricity system to meet our carbon goals.
The United States has the only proven and scalable tritium production supply chain, but it is largely reserved for nuclear weapons. Excess tritium production capacity should be leveraged to ensure the success of and U.S. leadership in fusion energy.