Monthly Archives: August 2017

The Trump administration this week elevated the US Cyber Command to a Unified Combatant Command, in a long-awaited move that underscores the growing importance of cyber warfare.

The decision, announced Friday, puts the Cyber Command on par with nine other combat commands, and may lead to its separation from the National Security Agency (NSA). In a statement, President Trump said that Secretary of Defense James Mattis will examine the possibility of separating the Cyber Command and the NSA, and that he will announce recommendations at a later date.

This new Unified Combatant Command will strengthen our cyberspace operations and create more opportunities to improve our Nations defense, Trump said in the statement. The elevation of United States Cyber Command demonstrates our increased resolve against cyberspace threats and will help reassure our allies and partners and deter our adversaries.

Trump says the move will streamline command and control of time-sensitive cyberspace operations.

Trump also said that the move will streamline command and control of time-sensitive cyberspace operations, and that it will ensure that critical cyberspace operations are adequately funded.

Proposals for creating an independent Cyber Command were first made under the Obama administration, with supporters arguing that the units mandate was sometimes at odds with the NSAs intelligence gathering operations particularly with regard to the fight against ISIS.

Cyber Command was created as a sub-unit of the US Strategic Command, with a mandate to conduct cyber warfare and defend government networks. Navy Admiral Michael Rogers currently leads both Cyber Command and the NSA.

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Trump elevates Cyber Command, setting the stage for NSA separation - The Verge

President Donald Trump announced Friday he has directed U.S. Cyber Command to be elevated to a unified combatant command and is exploring separating it from the National Security Agency.

In a statement, Trump said the move will strengthen our cyberspace operations and create more opportunities to improve our Nations defense.

Headquartered at Fort George G. Meade, the move will make Cyber Command a more influential institution within the Department of Defense.

The decision could have significant economic ramifications for western Anne Arundel County, where Fort Meade is based.

Tim OFarrell, general manager for the Fort Meade Alliance, said the decision is huge for the state of Maryland. Its huge for this region.

He said, What this means is greater emphasis on cyber and economic development around the region as companies want to come to a place that is so close to the center of it all.

Claire Louder, the former CEO of the West County Chamber of Commerce, said last year that a change in how Cyber Command is positioned within the Department of Defense could lead to more opportunities for cyber companies looking to sign military contracts.

Currently, the agency is a sub-unified command underneath the U.S. Strategic Command, and Adm. Michael Rogers is the head of the NSA and Cyber Command.

Eric Geller, a cybersecurity reporter for Politico, wrote on Twitter the move elevates Cyber Command to the level of nine other unified combatant commands within the Department of Defense, such as U.S. Strategic Command and U.S. Pacific Command.

Louder said because resources are allocated differently to full combatant commands rather than sub-unified commands, the change could lead to another significant economic boom for the region.

That could also lead to better positioning for county officials to lobby for additional funding for infrastructure and school improvements as more people move to the area following job opportunities.

OFarrell said Friday that while the move was largely expected Congress had authorized the president to make this move through its fiscal year 2017 defense policy legislation its impact on the cybersecurity community should not be understated.

If you want to understand what is happening in that space, youre going to have to come through here, OFarrell said. I think youre going to see, from Annapolis to Columbia, continued new companies coming into the marketplace.

Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Baltimore County, whose 2nd District includes Fort Meade, lauded Trumps decision to elevate the agency in a statement.

Demand for cyber warfare capabilities is only going to increase and this decision will give the Command the power and resources it needs to better protect our country, he wrote.

Trump said in the statement the move will also help streamline command and control of time-sensitive cyberspace operations by consolidating them under a single commander with authorities commensurate with the importance of such operations.

The change follows years of intense debate as to how Cyber Command should be positioned within the Department of Defense.

Several high-ranking officials have proposed separating the agency entirely from the NSA.

Created in 2009 at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Cyber Command plays a more active and offensive role in military combat than the NSA, mostly over the internet rather than on the ground.

During President Barack Obamas administration, former Defense Secretary Ash Carter and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper argued Cyber Command should be independent of the NSA.

However, Arizona Sen. John McCain has been adamant he would block any plans to end the dual-hat leadership that oversees the NSA and Cyber Command.

In a statement, McCain said he was pleased by Trumps decision, adding there is much more to be done to prepare our nation and our military to meet our cybersecurity challenges.

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Trump elevates US Cyber Command, exploring split from NSA - CapitalGazette.com

A short drive south of Alice Springs, the second largest population center in Australias Northern Territory, there is a high-security compound, code-named RAINFALL. The remote base, in the heart of the countrys barren outback, is one of the most important covert surveillance sites in the eastern hemisphere.

Hundreds of Australian and American employees come and go every day from Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap, as the base is formally known. The official cover story, as outlined in a secret U.S. intelligence document, is to support the national security of both the U.S. and Australia. The [facility] contributes to verifying arms control and disarmament agreements and monitoring military developments. But, at best, that is an economical version of the truth. Pine Gap has a far broader mission and more powerful capabilities than the Australian or American governments have ever publicly acknowledged.

An investigation, published Saturday by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in collaboration with The Intercept, punctures the wall of secrecy surrounding Pine Gap, revealing for the first time a wide range of details about its function. The base is an important ground station from which U.S. spy satellites are controlled and communications are monitored across several continents, according to classified documents obtained by The Intercept from the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Together with the NSAs Menwith Hill base in England, Pine Gap has in recent years been used as a command post for two missions. The first, named M7600, involved at least two spy satellites and was said in a secret 2005 document to provide continuous coverage of the majority of the Eurasian landmass and Africa. This initiative was later upgraded as part of a second mission, named M8300, which involved a four satellite constellation and covered the former Soviet Union, China, South Asia, East Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and territories in the Atlantic Ocean.

The satellites are described as being geosynchronous, which means they are likely positioned high in orbit at more than 20,000 miles above the earths surface. They are equipped with powerful surveillance technology used to monitor wireless communications on the ground, such as those sent and received by cellphones, radios, and satellite uplinks. They gather strategic and tactical military, scientific, political, and economic communications signals, according to the documents, and also keep tabs on missile or weapons tests in targeted countries, sweep up intelligence from foreign military data systems, and provide surveillance support to U.S. forces.

An aerial image of the Pine Gap surveillance facility, located near Alice Springs in Australias Northern Territory.

Photo: BING

Outside Pine Gap, there are some 38 radar dishes pointing skyward, many of them concealed underneath golfball-like shells. The facility itself is isolated, located beyond a security checkpoint on a road marked with prohibited area signs, about a 10-minute drive from Alice Springs, which has a population of about25,000 people. There is a large cohort of U.S. spy agency personnel stationed at the site, including employees of the NSA, CIA, and National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that manages the spy satellites. Intelligence employees are joined by compatriots from the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force.

Pine Gap plays a significant role in supporting both intelligence activities and military operations, according to a top-secret NSA report dated from April 2013. One of its key functions is to gather geolocational intelligence, which can be used to help pinpoint airstrikes. The Australian base has a special section known as the geopit for this function; it is equipped with a number of tools available for performing geolocations, providing a broad range of geolocation capabilities in conjunction with other overhead, tactical, fixed site systems, notes an August 2012 NSA site profile of the facility.

Richard Tanter, a professor at the University of Melbourne, has studied Pine Gap for years. He has co-authored, with Bill Robinson and the late Desmond Ball, several detailed reports about the bases activities for California-based security think tankNautilus Institute. He reviewed the documents obtained by The Intercept and said that they showed there had been a huge transformation in Pine Gaps function in recent history.

The documents provide authoritative confirmation that Pine Gap is involved, for example, in the geolocation of cellphones used by people throughout the world, from the Pacific to the edge of Africa, Tanter said. It shows us that Pine Gap knows the geolocations it derives the phone numbers, it often derives the content of any communications, it provides the ability for the American military to identify and place in real-time the location of targets of interest.

The base, which was built in the late 1960s, was once focused only on monitoring missile tests and other military-related activities in countries such as Russia, China, Pakistan, Japan, Korea, and India. But it is now doing a great deal more, said Tanter. It has shifted from a national level of strategic intelligence, primarily to providing intelligence actionable, time-sensitive intelligence for American operations in [the] battlefield.

In 2013, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Pine Gap played a key role in controversial U.S. drone strikes. Over the past decade, drone attacks have killed a number of top Al Qaeda, Islamic State, and Taliban militants. But the strikes often taking place outside of declared war zones, in places such as Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan have also resulted in the deaths of hundreds of civilians, and in some cases are considered by human rights advocates to constitute potential war crimes and violations of international law.

The U.S. and its allies regularly use surveillance of communications as a tactic to track down and identify suspected militants. The NSA often locates drone targets by analyzing the activity of a cellphones SIM card, rather than the content of the calls an imprecise method that can lead to the wrong people being killed, as The Intercept has previously revealed. Its really like were targeting a cellphone, a former drone operator told us in 2014. Were not going after people were going after their phones, in the hopes that the person on the other end of that missile is the bad guy.

Concerns about such tactics are amplified in the era of President Donald Trump. Since his inauguration earlier this year, Trump has dramatically increased drone strikes and special operations raids, while simultaneouslyloosening battlefield rules and seekingto scrap constraints intended to prevent civilian deaths in such attacks. According to analysis from the group Airwars, which monitors U.S. airstrikes, civilian casualties in the U.S.-led war against the Islamic State are on track to double under Trumps administration.

Afghan villagers gather near a house destroyed in an apparent NATO raid in Logar province, south of Kabul, Afghanistan, on June 6, 2012.

Photo: Ihsanullah Majroh/AP

David Rosenberg, a 23-year veteran of the NSA who worked inside Pine Gap as a team leader for more than a decade, acknowledged that the base was used to geolocate particular electronic transmissions. He told The Intercept and ABC that the base helps to provide limitation of civilian casualties by providing accurate intelligence, and insisted that the governments of Australia and the United States would of course want to minimize all civilian casualties.

But that reassurance is unlikely to satisfy critics.

Emily Howie, director of advocacy and research at Australias Human Rights Law Centre, said the Australian government needs to provide accountability and transparency on its role in U.S. drone operations. The legal problem thats created by drone strikes is that there may very well be violations of the laws of armed conflict and that Australia may be involved in those potential war crimes through the facility at Pine Gap, Howie said. The first thing that we need from the Australian government is for it to come clean about exactly what Australians are doing inside the Pine Gap facility in terms of coordinating with the United States on the targeting using drones.

For more than 100 years, Australia has been a close U.S. ally; the country has supported the American military in every major war since the early 1900s. This relationship was formalized in 1951, when Australia and the U.S. signed the ANZUS Treaty, a mutual defense agreement. Australia is also a member of the Five Eyes surveillance alliance, alongside the U.S., the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand. The countrys electronic eavesdropping agency, the Australian Signals Directorate, maintains extremely close ties with its American counterparts at the NSA. The agencies have a mutually beneficial partnership, according to one top-secret NSA document. While the NSA shares its technology, cryptanalytic capabilities, and resources for state-of-the-art collection, processing and analytic efforts, the Australians provide access to Pine Gap; they also hand over terrorism-related communications collected inside Australia, plus intelligence on some neighboring countries in their region, such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore.

The relationships foundations are strong, but some cracks may be beginning to appear. This was highlighted in late January when, after just two weeks in the Oval Office, Trump had a contentious first conversation with Australias prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull. Trump berated his Australian counterpart over the terms of a refugee deal and abruptly ended the call, describing it as ridiculous and unpleasant.

Meanwhile, Trump has adopted a more confrontational tone with China Australias top trading partner and he has threatened North Korea with fire and fury over its repeated missile tests. The situation has created a degree of uncertainty for Australia, and some in the country are pondering whether it is time to re-evaluate its traditional alliances.

There are changing moods in the United States, said John McCarthy, one of Australias most distinguished and experienced diplomats, who formerly served as the countrys ambassador to the U.S. So, we then need to think, should we try and develop closer security relationships with other countries in Asia? Should we seek to improve our overall structural relationship with China?

Were entering into a very, very fluid situation in Asia, McCarthy added. I dont know what the outcomes are going to be. But we have to be very, very nimble in terms of trying to create new structures, create new relationships, to be able to look at new circumstances from a very independent security perspective, if we are to do the right thing by the Australian people over the next generation or so.

Because of Australias proximity to the Korean peninsula, the North Korea issue is a particularly sensitive one. The city of Darwin in the Northern Territory is about 3,600 miles from Pyongyang, within range of an intercontinental ballistic missile strike. As such, the implications are severe for Australia: It could be dragged into a devastating conflict if the U.S. were to become embroiled in war with Kim Jong-uns rogue state. And despite its isolated position in the outback, Pine Gap would likely be at the forefront of the action.

Pine Gap literally hardwires us into the activities of the American military and in some cases, that means we will cop the consequences, like it or not, said Tanter, the University of Melbourne professor. Pine Gap will be contributing hugely in real-time to those operations, as well as in preparation for them. So whether or not the Australian government thinks that an attack on North Korea is either justified, or a wise and sensible move, we will be part of that, Tanter added. Well be culpable in the terms of the consequences.

The NSA and the Australian governments Department of Defence declined to comment.

This story was prepared in collaboration with the Australian Broadcasting Corporations investigative radio program Background Briefing and ABC News. Peter Cronau contributed reporting.

Documents published with this article:

Top photo: Australian Defence Facilities Pine Gap on Feb. 19, 2016.

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The US Spy Hub in the Heart of Australia - The Intercept