NSA Director Calls for Partnership at RSA 2009

by Dana Tierney, Senior Assistant Editor

"We do not want to run cybersecurity for the United States government. That's a big job," said Lieutenant General Keith B. Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency, at the RSA Conference 2009 last week. "It's going to take a team to do it."

"We have a part in it," he added. "We're technical people. We'll have the lead, I think, for the Defense Department and the intel community for critical national security systems. But we need partnership with others."

Alexander's talk was just one of a series of keynotes at RSA Conference 2009 in which speakers emphasized the well-organized adversaries faced by the security community and asked how it can work together as a team to solve this problem.

For example, Alexander said, said that in the Estonia cyber riot in late April and early May of 2007, an estimated million botnets producing more than five thousand clicks per second attacked telephone exchanges, government agencies, telephone systems, newspapers and banks.

After delineating the NSA's technical support role in the comprehensive national cyber initiative, Alexander turned to history, speaking on the role played by Enigma and other code devices such as Sigsaly and Sigaba in information assurance and intelligence gathering and, through them, in the outcome of World War Two. "In World War 2, this was a game changer. The war in the Atlantic raged over this one communication device," he said of Enigma.

The comprehensive cyber security initiative encompasses situational awareness of threats and cyber attack attribution to defend against intruders and preserve privacy and civil liberties, he said.

He said he had briefed the president "on how we collect" and emphasized that "the laws that we follow and the rules that we follow are under court order, be it FISA or Executive Order 12333. And yes, we make mistakes, and when we make a mistake we self-report. We report to our overseers. We tell people about it.... We tell the DINI, the Director of National intelligence, the DOD, the DOJ, the Attorney-General, Congress, the administration and the New York Times," he said to audience laughter.

He added that concern for civil liberties has an important place in the discussion. "As you walk through cyber security, you get the impression that it is civil liberties or security. I think we've got to endeavor to do both. Equally. And balance them. We do. For all of us."

The full speech can be found at http://media.omediaweb.com/rsa2009/webcast.htm?id=1_6.

Dana Tierney is the Sr. Assistant Editor at House of Fusion, where she causes authors to cry over their once-thought perfect articles. They recover, and their articles are better for it. But still, the sound of grown men weeping...

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