The military keeps saying that it only wants to defend its own networks — not yours, civilian. Only if the Department of Homeland Security, which safeguards the civilian internet, comes calling will they help out, the generals insist. Today, the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense started to lay the ground work for how to come calling. And to make the whole thing easier, DHS and the National Security Agency, the super-secret military-intelligence hybrid, will station officials at each other’s headquarters.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano today released a recently-inked joint accord trying to clarify each department’s roles in the event of a cyber attack. Neither department changed the rules for who protects the dot-com and dot-gov networks (Homeland Security) and who protects the dot-mil domain (Defense). But the document — our Doc of the Day, which you can read below — does establish that the military chocolate is in the civilian peanut butter when it comes to cybersecurity.
Basically, the memo orders a big bureaucratic exchange of personnel. The Department of Homeland Security is going to embed some of its people at the National Security Agency, which already runs telecom surveillance dragnets and works to keep hackers and spies out of government networks. It’ll send over a new Director for Cybersecurity Coordination and a bunch of privacy lawyers and civil-rights officials to ensure that neither NSA nor its military twin, the U.S. Cyber Command, cross any legal boundaries.
But other boundaries are more porous. The new director will send and receive requests for NSA and Cyber Command to collaborate on “joint planning” and “information sharing between the public and private sectors to aid in preventing, detecting, mitigating, and/or recovering from the effects of an attack.” For its part, the NSA will create a “Cryptologic Services Group” inside Homeland Security’s National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center.
