Sometimes, the only checks and balances keeping American government honest are other government agencies. That’s a sad statement if you really think about it – how honest do you really think the federal government manages to be when it answers only to itself? The new director of the National Cyber Security Center has resigned after a year at the post. He found it hard to do his job because the National Security Agency didn’t want him to do his job.
The intelligence culture embodied by the NSA is “very different than a network operations or security culture,” said Beckstrom in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by Computerworld. Allowing a single agency such as the NSA to handle all top-level government network security and monitoring functions poses a significant threat to “our democratic processes,” he said. “Instead, we advocated a model where there is a credible civilian government cybersecurity capability which interfaces with, but is not controlled by, the NSA.”
Much like the CIA, the NSA is a gigantic and shadowy organization. The NSA seems to be better at keeping secrets and has a bigger budget that its more maligned little cousin. Wonder what all they are doing with your money and in your name? Probably worth thinking about. Whether you can do a damn thing about any of it is not clear. If the director of an oversight agency gives up it indicates that change will not come easily to the NSA. Nothing fights harder than a cornered bureaucrat with a license to kill and a nearly unlimited budget.
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