Exceptionally
grave damage: NSA refuses to declassify Obama’s cybersecurity
directive
The
National Security Agency has shot down a Freedom of Information Act
request for details about an elusive presidential order that may
allow the government to deploy the military within the United States
for the supposed sake of cybersecurity.
RT,
20
November, 2012
The
Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) reports on Tuesday that
their recent FOIA request for information about a
top-secret memo signed
last month by US President Barack Obama has been rejected [PDF].
Now attorneys for EPIC say they plan to file an appeal to get to the
bottom of Presidential Policy Directive 20.
Although
the executive order has been on the books for a month now, only last
week did details emerge about the order after the Washington Post
reported that Pres. Obama’s signature to the top-secret directive
could allow the White House to send in recruits from the Pentagon to
protect America’s cyber-infrastructure.
Because
Presidential Policy Directive 20 is classified, the exact wording of
the elusive document has been a secret kept only by those with
first-hand knowledge of the memo. For their November 14 article, the
Post spoke with sources that saw the document to report that
the directive
“effectively enables the military to act more aggressively to
thwart cyberattacks on the nation’s web of government and private
computer networks.”
In
response to the Post’s report, EPIC filed a FOIA request to find
out if the policy directive could mean military deployment within the
United States, especially since the sources who have seen the memo
say it allows the Pentagon to pursue actions against adversaries
within a vaguely described terrain known only as “cyberspace.”
“What
it does, really for the first time, is it explicitly talks about how
we will use cyber-operations,” a
senior administration official told the Post. “Network
defense is what you’re doing inside your own networks. . . .
Cyber-operations is stuff outside that space, and recognizing that
you could be doing that for what might be called defensive purposes.”
“We’d
like to see what the language says and see what power is given,” EPIC
attorney Amie Stepanovich told RT this week — a matter that will
now have to be appealed before any details can be determined.
News
of the directive comes just as lawmakers in Congress failed once
again to approve a cybersecurity legislation that would provide new
connections between the federal government and the private sector in
order to supposedly ramp up the United States’ protection from
foreign hackers. With the defeat of that bill, though, members of
both the House and Senate now say they expect Pres. Obama to sign a
separate executive order that will lay down the groundwork for a more
thorough cybersecurity plan to be established.
Meanwhile,
the commander-in-chief has already signed a secret order —
Presidential Policy Directive 20 — that might remain classified
unless EPIC can win in court.
“We
believe that the public hasn’t been able to involve themselves in
the cybersecurity debate, and the reason they can’t involve
themselves is because they don’t have the right amount of
information,” Stepanovich
tells RT.
Responding
to the FOIA request, the NSA says releasing information on the
directive cannot occur because“disclosure
could reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to
the national security.”
“Because
the document is currently and properly classified, it is exempt from
disclosure,” the
NSA writes.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.