Testifying to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper talked of myriad threats to US national security interests, saying that cyberattacks were the “biggest” threat of all.
It seems an incredible argument to make, as the Obama Administration is in the middle of escalation in the ISIS war and talking up the threat of “Russian aggression” on a near-daily basis.
Still, Clapper insists that hackers are the real threat, and that in the years to come they’ll threaten America’s “economic competitiveness and national security” more than anything else.
Considering how much wars have cost the US economy, that too is a bold prediction, but it reflects US intelligence officials across several agencies seeking to get more and more involved in the Internet, and the easiest way to do that is to present it as some sort of mortal threat.
There's a problem no doubt. It seems that no commercial site can keep our data from getting in the hands of hackers, despite paying hundreds of thousands to CIOs and C whatever Os to sit on their butts and watch porn instead of worrying about keeping their customers credit card numbers secure. And there's the problem of our banks using antiquated magnetic strip cards, and so on. Not sure what libertarians would say about all this, it's not proving to be very effective to let the private sector handle their own security, and holy competition hasn't managed to get these greedy jerks to innovate, or rather to get at least to current standards of security. Just wait until someone hacks Amazon, or a DMV, or Apple.
Still that hardly represents a threat to competitiveness. Good for nothing American executives have a handle on that. In terms of national security, serial liars like Jimmy the Clap see a threat to it everywhere they go. The laughable thing is that he sees the problem being…Russia, China, and techno powerhouses Iran and North Korea, of course. So clearly if cyber-security is in the hands of clueless senior citizen like him, the US is doomed.
Counter intelligence — The best paid deceivers in government
How good going great can it get, only National Security with their counter intelligence division can handle such a catastrophe. Or so we are told, but then, how are we to know if National Security people are not the very ones causing all those computers to self-destruct? For when deception, deceit and trickery are what counter intelligence is all about, is it not humanly impossible to know who is tricking who?
To — RickR30
May but how your words do always so confuse the issue, for government is run by and for the corporate rich, as they supply most all political donations turning most all politicians into paid actors.
For the “private sector” corporate rich handle all security, as they hand pick all the heads of our military and our government including those in National Security.
Not sure if the corporate rich handpick all the heads of the military. It's true that the public/private distinction is rather insignificant. But it's one that is at the core for the right, left and for libertarians.
Why isn't this perjurer in an orange jumpsuit at Club Fed? Why oh why is he still in a position of power and allowed to bloviate? Disgusting.
Granted that all the above accurately describe this perjuring shill of the 1%, what he says about the relative magnitude of the two threats makes logical sense. Daesh (IS, ISIS, ISIL) is certainly an existential regional threat, but does not pose a serious threat to the continuity of the USG, or to the continued function of the day-to-day activities that make it possible for our nation to exist (airline flight management, electrical grid mgm't, railway mgm't, distribution of power over the grid, the national & international communications networks, and a myriad of other functions that make it possible for our society to exist as more than a loosely affiliated collection of small neighborhoods, townships, & villages, all of which are computer dependent. Those with the knowledge and will to entirely disrupt those functions do pose an existential threat to our society as we know it far beyond anything Daesh has to offer (other than its own cyberwarfare capability).