Congress wants answers on next cyber czar

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With help from Maggie Miller

Driving the day

— Lawmakers are beginning to lose patience with the White House, which they accuse of moving too slowly to pick the next national cyber director.

HAPPY MONDAY, and welcome to Morning Cybersecurity! There is at least one thing in this country that is hotter than OpenAI right now. You’ll know the answer if you’ve been to a bakery — any bakery — within the last three months.

It’s the Kouign-amann, the unpronounceable Breton dessert that I’ve suddenly noticed anywhere and everywhere from D.C. to New York. I need to try one.

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Today's Agenda

NSA general counsel April Doss will speak on Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act at an event hosted by the American Bar Association and the Army and Navy Club of D.C. Noon.

At the White House

SOME PENNSYLVANIA AVE. FOOT-DRAGGING — The White House is taking its sweet time to nominate a new national cyber director, and Congress is starting to get peeved.

As of this weekend, it’s been two months since the nation’s first national cyber director, Chris Inglis, retired from the White House post that Congress created four years ago to help the executive branch flip the script against cyberattacks. But the Biden administration has had even longer to noodle on possible replacements, seeing as Inglis told them of his retirement plans in early December.

That foot-dragging has not just irked lawmakers. It’s starting to worry them, Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) told me during a weekend phone call.

“I think this is one of the most important jobs in the United States government,” said King, who spearheaded the legislation to create the position. The consequences of slow-rolling a replacement “will range from annoying to catastrophic.”

No excuses — King said he and other members of Congress had voiced their frustrations with the White House, but lawmakers have gotten “no explanation at all” from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave..

“The White House is moving unacceptably slow to nominate a new national cyber director,” Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wisc.) agreed. “The White House just released the first strategy and now they are moving backwards by failing to nominate someone for this position.”

The White House did not respond to an emailed request about the perceived dawdling.

Ready and waiting — King said Congress would move quickly to vote on a new nominee whenever that announcement comes.

It’s clear the Biden administration isn’t wanting for good candidates, he added, sharing two “qualified” names he’s heard: Suzanne Spaulding, the former head of the DHS agency that became CISA, and Kemba Walden, the acting national cyber director.

“They’ve got one of the right people right under their nose,” King said about Walden.

Don’t drop the ball — King and Gallagher, co-chairs of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission, both argued that the next NCD will be crucial to translating the new and well-received national cybersecurity strategy into practice.

“Each day the position goes unfilled is a day wasted towards achieving this mission,” said Gallagher.

And if the White House doesn’t get its act together soon, I asked King? “I would hate to see some major cyber incident without having a person in this important coordinating job,” he told me.

On the Hill

4 Q’S TO PLUG A LEAK — Congress is returning to town after a two-week recess, meaning they’ll finally have a chance to ask the intelligence community an important question: What the heck do we do about these leaks?

Here are four (better) inquiries lawmakers should put before the IC, courtesy of counter-intelligence experts and Congressional boffins.

Is the leak locked down? — Only a fraction of the documents that Massachusetts Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira dumped on Discord made found their way to the media.

How many of the remainder — which are thought to range in the hundreds — are still out there? And what is the U.S. government doing to lock them down, asked Michael McLaughlin, a former senior counterintelligence official at U.S. Cyber Command.

“If I were the Russians or the Chinese or really any adversary, I would absolutely be identifying those individuals who are in the Discord chat group and sending each one of them phishing emails on a daily basis,” said McLaughlin.

A problem with IT folk? — Teixeira, 21, may not have opted to spill government secrets for ideological reasons, but he did have one thing in common with Edward Snowden: he also specialized in IT.

That raises an obvious question, said Emily Harding, former deputy staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“Why, almost 10 years post-Snowden, are we not in a place now where we separate these job responsibilities in an electronic way?” asked Harding.

Too many secrets for too many people? — Roughly 1.25 million Americans have a top secret clearance — same as Teixeira — while another 1.7 million have a secret clearance.

According to former Rhode Island lawmaker Rep. Jim Langevin, that suggests the IC’s love for a need-to-know may have gone too far.

“There really needs to be a review of who has access to classified information and perhaps we need to compartmentalize things,” Langevin told Maggie on a call this weekend.

How to improve IC social media monitoring? — It took U.S. spies many months to catch wind of what Teixeira was up to on Discord, which casts a rather unfavorable light on their ability to prevent future online document drips, said Holden Triplett, a former FBI official and onetime director for counterintelligence at the National Security Council.

“I think they can do a lot better job on social media monitoring,” said Triplett. Still, he cautioned, balancing that type of counter-intelligence activity with Americans’ First Amendment rights represents a significant challenge.

The FBI “can’t just go around and listen to every Discord,” he said.

Surveillance

BIG WEEKS FOR 702 — The debate around a controversial electronic surveillance program is starting to heat up, even if we’re still eight months out from a congressional sunset that will force many simmering issues to the surface.

Over the weekend, The New York Times reported that the FBI had searched data collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for information on Rep. Darin LaHood (R-Ill.) because it was concerned that Chinese spooks were after the lawmaker — not that LaHood himself had committed any wrongdoing.

Into the breach — The explanation was likely calculated to allay mounting concerns about when and why the Bureau sifts through those repositories for intel on U.S. citizens, the aspect of the program that has drawn the most scrutiny to date.

But civil liberties advocates aren’t buying it, countering that the intelligence community has used and abused that “defensive” pretext to skirt Americans’ privacy safeguards many times before.

The good side of leaks — Meanwhile, there’s some argument that the Teixeira leaks aren’t just bad news bears for the intelligence community. Why?

Advocates of 702 reauthorization have long been pushing the intelligence community to declassify more intel demonstrating the immense value of the program.

And the leaked documents, many of which cite “FISA” as their source, do just that, per a Saturday Wall Street Journal article.

More on the schedule — NSA general counsel April Doss is speaking on 702 at an event today, and on Tuesday and Wednesday top officials at U.S. Cyber Command, the Pentagon and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence will speak at the Command’s 2023 Legal Conference.

So, it’s a fair bet you’ll hear more 702 talk — and counter-talk — in the coming days.

Tweet of the Day

Signal CEO Meredith Whittaker has a fantastic thread on sniffing out AI snakeoil:

Quick Bytes

— If it invaded Taiwan, here’s how China might take aim at U.S. networks. (POLITICO)

— A major ransomware group has developed one of the first encryptors for Mac devices, alarming the security community. (Bleeping Computer)

— How online gaming presents a new counterintelligence risk. (Foreign Policy)

— Experts offer some thoughts on the U.K.’s “responsible” cyber strategy. (RUSI)

Chat soon.

Stay in touch with the whole team: Maggie Miller ([email protected]); John Sakellariadis ([email protected]); and Heidi Vogt ([email protected]).

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