MARCH 11, 2014
Rogers Appears Before Senate
Vice Admiral Michael S. Rogers testifies at a Senate Armed Services Committee on his nomination to run the National Security Agency.
WASHINGTON — All of the major combat commands in the United States military will soon have dedicated forces to conduct cyberattacks alongside their air, naval and ground capabilities, Vice Adm. Michael S. Rogers, President Obama’s nominee to run the National Security Agency, told the Senate on Tuesday. He said the activation of the long-discussed combat units would help counter the perception around the world that the United States is “an easier mark” for cyberattacks because it did not “have the will to respond.”
Admiral Rogers’s comments, in written answers to the Senate Armed Services Committee, amounted to one of the most detailed public descriptions of how the United States is spending billions of dollars to develop an offensive military capability to use cyberweapons. The committee must approve his simultaneous appointment as the head ofUnited States Cyber Command, a job he will hold in addition to overseeing the N.S.A. The retiring head of the Cyber Command, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, first announced the creation of offensive and defensive teams last year.
During a two-hour appearance before the committee, Admiral Rogers also confirmed that the United States had seen evidence of cyberattacks on the new government in Ukraine, but declined to say whether the United States believed the Russian government was the source of the attacks, or how much damage was done.
“I believe we see it today in the Ukraine,” he said of the reports of malware, apparently written in the Moscow time zone, that have shown up in Ukrainian government systems. “We’ve seen it in Syria, Georgia. It increasingly is becoming a norm.”
“Clearly, cyber will be an element of almost any crisis we’re going to see in the future,” he told the senators.
At another point in the hearing, Admiral Rogers said he believed that both the United States and Defense Department systems were both still vulnerable to major attacks, and would be until “a new architecture” was in place to defend them.
Admiral Rogers, currently the head of the Navy’s Fleet Cyber Command, was cautious in what he said in the hearing about the future of the N.S.A.’s domestic surveillance activities, notably its collection of the metadata — telephone numbers and durations of calls — for virtually every call placed in the United States. He said he was only beginning to learn about their details since Mr. Obama tapped him for one of the most powerful job combinations in Washington: head of the country’s electronic surveillance and code-breaking operations, and commander of its growing corps of cyberwarriors.
But he rebuffed suggestions that the N.S.A. could track down terrorism suspects without having the telephone call data available in some form. And he sounded hesitant about the possible effects of Mr. Obama’s initiative to put that information into the hands of a third party, expressing concern that it would slow the ability to track links among potential terrorism suspects. He said the trick was to “query the data in a way that both protects the rights of the individual but also enables us to get answers in a quick, reasonable time period.”
He promised that the N.S.A.’s programs would become “more transparent,” and said he would “assure a sense of accountability” for the agency’s activities.
As usual for a public hearing involving the likely head of one of the nation’s most secretive intelligence agencies, the most intriguing answers often involved what Admiral Rogers left unsaid, or said he was willing to discuss in greater detail in a classified session. For example, when Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, talked about a recent attack on the Navy’s unclassified computer systems by Iran, Admiral Rogers acknowledged the attack — and refused to say what country was behind it. “It was a significant penetration,” he told the committee. But the attackers “did not opt to engage in any destructive behaviors,” he said, suggesting that Iran’s main motive was espionage.
While many had expected Admiral Rogers to be grilled about the N.S.A.’s surveillance programs, he was spared that in part because he was testifying alongside Gen. Paul J. Selva of the Air Force, whom Mr. Obama nominated to command the United States Transportation Command, which moves military equipment and personnel around the world. In scenes reminiscent of the portrayal of Congress in the Netflix series “House of Cards,” senator after senator pressed General Selva to embrace, on the record, the importance of air bases in their home districts, ahead of a possible new round of base closings.
Admiral Rogers, however, engaged a subject matter that rarely gets discussed in public: how to deter attacks on the United States. He said part of the answer was using “the newest technology to identify our attackers before and during an attack — not just after.”
Without referring directly to a secret N.S.A. program to place “implants” on computer networks around the world, so American officials could see attacks in the making, he said in his written answer that the United States could make it clear that it knows where attacks are coming from and is prepared to retaliate.
“This is within our capacity to fix,” he said.
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