Gen. Paul Nakasone is not eager to embrace new authorities that would allow the National Security Agency to use its surveillance tools within the United States and pushed for other ways to gain the visibility needed to detect hacks like those recently executed by suspected nation-state actors.
“My responsibilities both as a commander of U.S. Cyber Command and as a director of the National Security Agency are rightly outside of the country,” he told Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jack Reed during a committee hearing Thursday.
Previous hearings on the recent breaches of nine federal agencies and many more state, local and private-sector entities highlighted the perpetrators' use of domestic infrastructure to mask their operations. The hackers took advantage of laws barring unwarranted surveillance within the U.S., some members of Congress suggested.
Nakasone said there is a need for greater visibility into domestic infrastructure but that it could also be achieved through public-private partnerships and is something the administration is working on.
He said the military’s role in implementing the previous administration’s “defend forward” initiative where the NSA and CYBERCOM actively hunt for and eliminate threats overseas is crucial but added, “I also think there's a broader piece that that is being worked right now by the administration in terms of how do we improve the further resilience of the United States, as we look at adversaries continuing to avoid our laws and policies, and [trying] to use our own infrastructure in their own attempts.”
Senator after senator asked the general whether he needs more authorities to effectively detect hacks like the ones that exploited weaknesses in software from Micros ..
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