Defense secretary calls for rebuilding ties to Silicon Valle
Source: Troy Wolverton
In a speech at the university's business school, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter made a plea for repairing ties between the federal government and Silicon Valley that frayed in the wake of revelations by Edward Snowden of widespread spying by the government on citizens and tech companies.
Carter noted the government and the technology industry had weathered past strains and reminded the audience that many popular civilian technologies such as the Internet, the global positioning system and Google's search algorithm had their roots in investment by the government -- particularly the Defense Department. The two sides would benefit from working more closely together both to combat emerging threats, such as attacks on computer networks, but also to develop new technologies, he said.
"We've had tensions before and likely will again," Carter said. But he added, "I believe we must renew the bonds of trust and rebuild the bridge between the Pentagon and Silicon Valley."
To help foster better ties, the Department of Defense will open an office in Silicon Valley dubbed Defense Innovation Unit X. To be staffed with both military and civilian employees, the office will serve as the department's outpost in the valley, charged with scouting out new technologies and establishing and maintaining relationships with both startups and established technology companies.
Carter also announced a pilot program with In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit that in the past has backed startups working on technology of interest to the nation's intelligence agencies. The Department of Defense will invest a small amount of money -- estimated to be in the millions of dollars -- with In-Q-Tel to help find new technologies and startups that could have defense applications.
The department wants to partner with private sector companies involved in everything from robotics to 3-D printing to the Internet of Things to biomedical engineering, Carter said.
"If we're going to leverage these technologies to defend our country and help make a better world, the Department of Defense cannot do everything in all these areas alone," he said. "We have to work with those on the outside who have expertise."
Carter said collaboration between his agency and the private sector is particularly important when it comes to combating cyber threats. The government will do its part by being more open about threats and its abilities to defend against them, he said. As an example, he disclosed for the first time that earlier this year an unclassified agency network was compromised by Russian hackers. The agency's cyberexperts were able to identify and respond to the threat within 24 hours, he said.
The Department of Defense is working to strengthen and defend its own networks, but it needs help in defending those outside of its purview, he said, noting that some 90 percent of U.S. computer networks are controlled by the private sector.
"We want to help where we can, but if companies themselves don't invest, our country's collective cybersecurity posture is weakened," he said.
Carter's call for greater cooperation on the cybersecurity threat comes as a related bill is making its way through Congress. That bill, which passed the House of Representatives Wednesday, would make it easier for companies to share information about cyberattacks with federal investigators. Privacy advocates have charged that the bill would enable greater surveillance of citizens by allowing companies to secretly share information on their customers with the National Security Agency.
Two months ago, President Barack Obama gave a speech at Stanford on cybersecurity and signed an executive order intended to better protect computer networks and data.
The threat posed by cyberattacks has come to the fore amid a string of high-profile incidents, including the attack on Sony Pictures' network last fall and the massive hacking attacks on Target, Home Depot and other companies.
While Carter mentioned Snowden, he spent little time addressing the issues raised by Snowden's revelations, which inspired the current strains between Silicon Valley and the government. According to the Snowden documents, the National Security Agency -- an arm of the Department of Defense -- has hacked into the servers of Google, Yahoo and other companies and intercepted networking products developed by Cisco to secretly put in place data tracking technologies. Technology firms have worried that these revelations have harmed their businesses by undermining their reputations with foreign customers.
Carter offered no apologies for those actions, but in a question-and-answer session after his speech, Carter said the government had already adjusted some of its surveillance practices in response to criticism and acknowledged that it needed to be more open about its surveillance practices and why it's doing them. He also tried to assure the audience that the surveillance has been legal and was only done for national security purposes.
"When we do surveillance, we do it to counter terrorism, to counter military actions, to counter trafficking and other things that are heinous," he said. "We do not do it to collect private information for information's sake."
But revelations in the Snowden documents that the NSA spied on German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Brazilian company Petrobras as well as collected the phone records of millions of innocent citizens belie the narrow role for surveillance that Carter suggested. And privacy advocates argue that the ubiquitous surveillance not only violates American's privacy rights, but that it's ineffective at actually stopping threats.
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