As the Pentagon's cyberattacks increase, experts warn of weak congressional oversight via SeanDNaylor
WASHINGTON — When U.S. Cyber Command launched a stealth assault in June on an Iranian intelligence organization linked to attacks on commercial ships in the Gulf of Oman, nobody told Congress ahead of time.
That move is fraught with significant risks, according to critics, including that foreign powers will retaliate against Cyber Command’s military missions by launching cyberattacks against private American firms. “That’s not a consideration that our normal military operators are used to calculating,” said Suzanne Spaulding, a former undersecretary of the Department of Homeland Security who previously worked as a lawyer for the CIA and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
In addition to cyber attacks, the Pentagon’s carve-out has also affected areas such as low-visibility special operations missions and information operations. During the negotiations after the Iran-Contra scandal, “the armed services committees backed [the Pentagon] because they didn’t want to give up their jurisdiction,” Rizzo said. This suited the military just fine, according to several sources. The Pentagon believed that it received “more compliant and complacent” oversight from those committees than it would get from the intelligence committees, Rizzo told an audience in Washington, D.C., during a June 24 panel discussion on intelligence issues.
Spaulding questioned whether those committees were hiring staff with “the right skill sets” to oversee cyber operations. “My guess is that’s lagging, that the skill sets on the committees aren’t yet where they need to be,” she said. Nonetheless, some fear that by exempting Cyber Command’s missions from the normal covert action oversight regime, the Pentagon is running a dangerous risk. Offensive cyber operations are still a relatively new, extremely sensitive and risky phenomenon, with the potential for significant foreign policy and international law implications if something goes wrong, according to Spaulding. “That is characteristic of covert actions and why we put this oversight mechanism in place,” she said.
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