14 DAY TRIAL // US Department of Defense (DoD), the National Security Agency (NSA) and the While House, all sent representatives to the RSA security conference that’s taking place in San Francisco and they revealed their intentions to enhance the control they have over the Internet.
According to Technology Review, US military forces want to become more involved and even though some budgets may be cut in the following years, the sums allocated for cyber defense will increase.
“Ships, planes, ground forces, lots of other things are on the cutting room floor, not cyber. The investments are at the level of several billion, [and] we are continuing to increase our investments,” deputy secretary of defense Ashton Carter said at the conference.
All that money will not be poured only into the government’s defense mechanisms, instead some of it will go toward the private sector, which they want to educate when it comes to the use of the Internet.
US officials also hope for a collaboration between the government and corporations regarding the mitigation of cyberattacks.
Debora Plunkett, director of the NSA's Information Assurance Directorate, said that they would pressure the private sector to automate all the security mechanisms that in many situations are neglected by organizations.
“We're spending too much time on network hygiene: missing patches, poor passwords, known vulnerabilities,” she said.
Another one of her priorities refers to the securing of smartphones and tablets which lately have become a problem for many companies.
While some politicians want to give the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) the power to actively monitor critical systems and rally for the DoD’s and NSA’s power to be enhanced, on the other side of the fence experts are worried about this militarization of the Internet.
It’s believed that the centralization proposed by the US government may lead to the fragmentation of the Web, seriously affecting the freedom it currently offers.
Former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden agrees that what they’re trying to do may affect the “Internet’s main principles,” but he claims that it’s too risky to leave the task of securing certain infrastructures in the hands of a non-governmental company.