White House Takes Cybersecurity Pitch to Silicon Valley

SAN FRANCISCO — President Obama’s newly installed defense secretary, Ashton B. Carter, toured Silicon Valley last week to announce a new military strategy for computer conflict, starting the latest Pentagon effort to invest in promising start-ups and to meet with engineers whose talent he declared the Pentagon desperately needed in fending off the nation’s adversaries.

Mr. Carter immediately acknowledged, though, the need to rebuild trust with Silicon Valley, whose mainstays — like Apple, Google and Facebook (whose new headquarters he toured) have spent two years demonstrating to customers around the world that they are rolling out encryption technologies to defeat surveillance. That, of course, includes blocking the National Security Agency, a critical member of the military-intelligence community.

“I think that people and companies need to be convinced that everything we do in the cyber domain is lawful and appropriate and necessary,” Mr. Carter told students and faculty at Stanford.

He urged the next generation of software pioneers and entrepreneurs to take a break from developing killer apps and consider a tour of service fending off Chinese, Russian and North Korean hackers, even as he acknowledged that the documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden, the former intelligence contractor, “showed there was a difference in view between what we were doing and what people perceived us as doing.”

Mr. Carter’s careful appeal was part of a campaign last week by government officials trying to undo the damage of Mr. Snowden’s revelations. While Mr. Carter got a respectful hearing, Jeh Johnson, the secretary of Homeland Security, and a group of other government officials ran into a buzz saw of skepticism at the world’s largest conference of computer security professionals, just 30 miles to the north.

Those officials argued for some kind of technical compromise to allow greater security of electronic communications while enabling the F.B.I. and intelligence agencies to decode the emails and track the web activities of suspected terrorists or criminals. Yet many among the computer security professionals at the conference argued that no such compromise was possible, saying that such a system would give Russians and Chinese a pathway in, too, and that Washington might abuse such a portal.

Not long after Mr. Johnson declared that “encryption is making it harder for your government to find criminal activity and potential terrorist activity,” large numbers of entrepreneurs and engineers crammed into the first of several seminars, called “Post-Snowden Cryptography.” There, they took notes as the world’s best code makers mocked the Obama administration’s drive for a “technical compromise” that would ensure the government some continued access.

 Read more @ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/27/us/white-house-takes-cybersecurity-pitch-to-silicon-valley.html?mabReward=A1

 

Surveillance reform bill returns with concessions to NSA on data collection

Exclusive: New modifications to USA Freedom Act permit agency to warrantlessly monitor foreign targets in US and track certain domestic targets

Modifications made on behalf of the National Security Agency have paved the way for the return of a major piece of surveillance reform legislation, the Guardian has learned.

According to congressional sources, the architects of the USA Freedom Act, a bill that seeks to stop the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records, have agreed to grant the surveillance giant temporary abilities to continue monitoring foreign targets who enter the US while agents seek domestic warrants; and to permit the agency to do the same for domestic targets for whom it has a probable-cause warrant who subsequently travel overseas.

Both additions, discussed for weeks but intensified in the past several days, were described as measures to gain support from pro-surveillance legislators on the House intelligence committee. Another such gesture included in the bill, unrelated to surveillance, would increase the maximum penalty for people lending material support to terrorism from 15 years to 20. The concessions were said to have come on behalf of the NSA, rather than from the NSA itself.

Read more @ http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/23/usa-freedom-act-revised-senate-bill-nsa

 

It Started With a Hack: How an NSA Director Became a Four-Star General

At the RSA Conference, retired Gen. Keith Alexander, a former NSA director, had a message for Edward Snowden and a plan for a new security startup.

SAN FRANCISCO—Retired Gen. Keith Alexander is best known as the man at the center of the National Security Agency (NSA) metadata collection program, revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden. Speaking at the RSA Conference here on April 24, Alexander talked about his life after retiring from the NSA in 2014.

Alexander (pictured) was onstage with Ted Schlein, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, who asked the former director of the NSA how he became a four-star general. It was all due to a hack, Alexander said.

Read more @ http://www.eweek.com/security/it-started-with-a-hack-how-an-nsa-director-became-a-four-star-general.html


Nothing like giving the enemy ideas now is there….ppfftttt smiley: eyes

NSA veteran chief fears crippling cyber-attack on Western energy infrastructure

The West lacks a shield against formidable foes and is losing the battle against Jihadi terrorism as chaos spreads across the Middle East

The West is losing the worldwide fight against jihadist terrorism and faces mounting risks of a systemic cyber-assault by extremely capable enemies, the former chief of the National Security Agency has warned.

"The greatest risk is a catastrophic attack on the energy infrastructure. We are not prepared for that," said General Keith Alexander, who has led the US battle against cyber-threats for much of the last decade.

Gen Alexander said the "doomsday" scenario for the West is a hi-tech blitz on refineries, power stations, and the electric grid, perhaps accompanied by a paralysing blow to the payments nexus of the major banks.

Read more @ https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/nsa-veteran-chief-fears-crippling-202910565.html

 

British intel expert joins Abbott review

Agencies hack foreign states. Xi’s Pakistan deal. Kudos for NZ Anzacs.

While not flinching from giving his advice to Europe on how to “stop the boats” crossing the Mediterranean with sometimes tragic outcomes − that is, adopting the Australian formula so delicately summed up by a Murdoch tabloid columnist as “balls of steel, can-do brains, tiny hearts and whacking great gunships” − Tony Abbott still heads to the mother country for key advice.

Earlier this month his department quietly announced the appointment of Sir Iain Lobban, the recently replaced director of Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, to an “independent panel of experts” advising Canberra’s review of Australian cybersecurity, due to report by midyear. As we reported earlier, Lobban stepped down in the wake of Edward Snowden’s embarrassing disclosures about GCHQ’s “Tempora” operation to collect metadata from the internet by tapping into optical-fibre trunk cables and other surveillance programs. His counterpart and deputy at the US National Security Agency (NSA) also got the heave-ho.

Alongside some business and private-sector IT figures, Canberra’s independent panel also includes a local source of expertise: Telstra’s chief information security officer, Mike Burgess, who was deputy director of cybersecurity at the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) until two years ago. Burgess would presumably have been up to date with everything at GCHQ, as the two outfits have been close partners since World War II, but having a knighted British spook on the team adds tone and undoubtedly broadens the picture.

Read more @ http://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/world/south-and-central-asia/2015/04/25/british-intel-expert-joins-abbott-review/14298840001794

NSA's Silicon Valley outreach a work in progress

SAN FRANCISCO -- Like countless other organizations, the National Security Agency made its pitch to attendees of the world’s largest IT security conference this week. But instead of offering flashy gadgets to test or raffling off smart phones, the agency went with a subdued and sober message: come serve your country.

Nearly two years after the revelations of NSA bulk-data collection by former contractor Edward Snowden, the agency was still the elephant in the room at the RSA conference in downtown San Francisco.

“How do we heal their wounds? I think part of it is getting those companies the facts,” retired Gen. Keith Alexander, the former NSA director, said April 24 at the conference. “That’s a classified set of briefings and the director of national intelligence, the White House, or someone, has got to bring them in and show them the facts.”

Read more @ http://fcw.com/articles/2015/04/24/nsa-outreach.aspx

Former NSA head Alexander asks agency to review patents

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Former National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander has asked the U.S. intelligence agency to review patent filings by his company to make sure that they do not reveal any secrets or misappropriate any government work.

Alexander told Reuters he took the step to head off additional controversy about IronNet Cybersecurity, a startup he announced after leaving the NSA last year.

"We think it's a good idea that the government review them," Alexander said in an interview ahead of an appearance at the RSA Conference on cyber security in San Francisco.

Alexander said his company had already applied for some patents, which should eventually become public record.

The patent issue has drawn questions from security experts and ethicists who wondered if Alexander would be profiting from the labours of others at the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, which he had also headed. Alexander previously dropped a plan to have an NSA employee work part-time at the startup.

Alexander said that the core ideas in the patents were brought to him by another employee who developed them in the private sector. An NSA spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.

Read more @ https://au.news.yahoo.com/technology/a/27324830/former-nsa-head-alexander-asks-agency-to-review-patents/


"What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us."  ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~