Centralizing Cyber Ops

The Defense Department has made progress in efforts to centralize its cyberspace operations but has “a long way to go,” Defense Secretary Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee in a hearing this morning.

Funds budgeted for cybersecurity in the fiscal year 2012 budget, including half a billion dollars for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency work, would put the “dot-mil” world in “pretty good shape," Gates said.

He added that he and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano had begun to better leverage DOD and DHS capabilities to help DHS protect its networks without running into privacy and civil liberties issues.

And this last summer, Secretary Napolitano and I signed a memorandum of understanding that gives -- that begins to move us in a direction where we can begin to do better at protecting dot-gov and dot-com. The reality is, there was a big debate -- and it went on in the Bush administration and it continued in this administration -- of people who did not for -- did not want to make use of NSA in domestic cyberprotection because of civil liberties and privacy concerns. And what Secretary Napolitano and I did was arrive at an agreement where DHS senior officials are now integrated into NSA's senior leadership. They have their own general counsel, their own firewalls, their own protections so that they can exploit and task NSA to begin to get coverage in the dot-gov and dot-com worlds. This is really important. And I think it's a start, but we still have a long way to go.