Partial Shutdown of Internet Infrastructure for Trump’s War on Terror and intelligence Shakeup
In the middle of a New Year’s Eve party at his estate in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, US President-elect Donald Trump threw out some of the ideas on national security issues he plans to set in motion after his inauguration in two weeks.
When reporters from a selected group invited to the party asked him about his plans for cyber defense and information security, he said “No computer is safe. You want something to really go without detection, write it out and have it sent by courier.”
Trump, soon to be the 45th US president, has not hidden his contempt for the way cyber attacks are handled at present and made it clear that he will do things differently as part of a general overhaul of the country’s 17 intelligence, espionage and security services.
Although he has no pretensions as an expert in this field, from his standpoint as a business CEO, Trump has often judged the huge investment in those agencies of tens of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of staff wholly disproportionate to their poor returns.
When the CIA insisted that Moscow was responsible for the cyberattack on the Democratic National Committee headquarters in 2016, he sneered on Twitter “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.“
Early Wednesday, Jan. 4, he tweeted again: The “intelligence” briefing on so-called “Russian hacking” was delayed until Friday, perhaps more time needed to build a case. Very strange!
The quotation marks were inserted by the author.
In a second tweet Wednesday, Trump, who in the past denigrated the WikiLeaks founder and editor, promoted his credibility at the expense of US intelligence, mockingly quoting Julian Assange as saying: "A 14 year old could have hacked Podesta" – Why was DNC so careless? Also said Russians did not give him the info!
Trump is expected by DEBKA Weekly’s sources to focus on four actions for upgrading cyber security:
1. An immediate review of US cyber defense, including the vulnerabilities of critical infrastructure, by teams consisting of experts from the military, law enforcement and the private sector. Their findings are to include recommendations that will serve as the basis of action for federal agencies and departments.
2. The US Justice Department will set up a task force for writing and synchronizing laws, regulations and teams dealing with cyber crime at the federal level.
3. The secretary of defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are to submit recommendations for strengthening the US Cyber Command, with emphasis on integration and coordination of offense and defense in the cyber domain.
4. The development of offensive cyber capabilities needed to deter and thwart cyberattacks by state and non-state players.
The US intelligence community is deliberately excluded from all four points as active figures. Trump distrusts the agencies’ work methods and the quality of their information-gathering. He does not intend to heed their assessments or rely on their sources of information.
The overhaul Trump is preparing for US intelligence and security agencies, particularly the NSA, the CIA and the Department of Homeland Security, will be deep-seated and painful.
He has already commented disparagingly on the perpetual overflow of intelligence reports that no one reads and serves no purpose other than to keep droves of analysts in their jobs.
The new president can also be expected to put an end to the rosy accounts put out by the administration of the great and glorious US military, intelligence, tactical and strategic exploits they performed in Iraq and Syria – which often turn out to be non-existent.
This category would also include such claims as the one made by President Barack Obama Wednesday in a speech at a military base in Virginia: “No foreign terror organization has successfully planned and executed an attack on our homeland these past eight years.”
The president-elected called US high-tech kings to a summit at Trump Tower, New York in December, to usher in a new era of cooperation between the private and government sectors. Although most didn’t vote for Trump, they came because they understood that, while customers provided their livelihood, the Obama era was over, and they would have to play ball with the new man in the White House. They also realized that he would not hesitate to act forcefully to strike down digital platforms used by terrorist organizations.
The high-tech leaders may also be advised that Trump was serious when he said that no computers were safe and he preferred couriers to email for confidential communications.
While there is no way to evaluate or put a time frame to Trump’s planned overhaul of US intelligence services before he takes office, he may be expected, in the interests of security, to impose a partial shutdown of internet infrastructures, strict censorship of content, restriction of access to networks in “problematic” areas and other measures already implemented by the presidents of Turkey, Russia and China.
Any terrorist attack will speed up and expand his reforms. There will be no repetition of US intelligence omissions to check the network accounts of known ISIS members and possibly foil such attacks, a lapse which happened in the Islamist attacks in San Bernardino and New York.
