The U.S. government continues to face a “trust deficit” with the technology community and must emphasize building relationships with the private sector in order to deal with next generation threats, top current and former intelligence officials said on Wednesday.
FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, Admiral Michael Rogers, head of the U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, and former National Counterterrorism Center Director Matthew Olsen were among those tackling questions on terrorism, cyberthreats, and the challenge of public-private partnerships at a one-day conference at CSIS in Washington, D.C. in honor of the 10-year anniversary of the National Security Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, created after the 9/11 attacks.
At the center of many of the discussions throughout the day was technology — from how terrorists are able to operate and push their agenda in cyberspace to the key question of what the government’s role should ultimately be in the digital domain.
“This truly is, I think – or it needs to be – the premier national discussion and debate going forward,” Brennan said. “What is the role of the government in this digital domain, in this cyber environment that is owned and operated 90 percent by the private sector? And I don’t think we have a national consensus right now about what the role of the FBI, Homeland Security, the government as a whole should be in trying to protect that environment.”
The ultimate answer, he suggested, will be “an unprecedented partnership between the government and private sector, because there’s not a government solution to this.”
“But if our way of life, if our country is going to be dependent on the security, the reliability, the resilience of that environment, the government cannot just hope that all the various private sector actors are going to fulfill their responsibilities,” Brennan said.
Building better relationships with the innovative private sector will be crucial to combat next generation threats, many panelists throughout the day’s event agreed.
“As much as we’ve made a lot of progress, I think, post-Snowden in regaining trust with the American people and rebuilding connections with our allies, I think we remain in a deficit with the technology community that continues to hamper cooperation and undermine our efforts on counterterrorism in particular,” Olsen said.
Earlier in the day, Comey also addressed the importance of public-private partnerships. The government needs to better encourage “the private sector to tell us when there is an intrusion,” the FBI director said.
“The majority of people who suffer an intrusion, we have discovered, do not contact law enforcement,” he said. “And that is a depressing state of affairs. But that means we’ve got to work harder to build confidence in them that, A, we need the information, and B, we will not re-victimize them with the way in which we handle that information. But that’s step by step, building that trust case by case by case.”
And Comey weighed in specifically on the role of social media platforms that can sometimes provide platforms to terrorist organizations, particularly complimenting Twitter for doing a “great job” of policing its network in the last year to 18 months.
“Deputizing” technology companies to help the government police speech is not appropriate, but it has also not been necessary,” Comey said. Companies understand the threat and are ready to help because they “never want to be in a situation where people are using this thing they have created to harm innocent people,” he said.
Conference speakers also pointed to the way technology has shifted the threat landscape. A top threat will continue to be lone wolf type of attacks thanks to ISIS having “established a playbook” to help mobilize people online, according to Olsen.
“How do you respond to attacks that are so simple to pull off but have an outsize impact in the level of fear they engender?” Olsen asked.
Rogers, who noted that technology has outstripped the legal frameworks currently in place and that a nationwide debate on that issue is essential, also highlighted the way technology has given more opportunities to those seeking to cause harm.
“We have got to acknowledge that technology is providing a level of capacity and capability to a whole host of actors out there,” Rogers said.
Meanwhile, Brennan said that terrorists have proven to be very sophisticated in their use of available technologies, such as encryption. They are “quite adept at leveraging those technical capabilities in order to ply their trade,” he told attendees.
“Technology has really helped advance the human condition, but it has complicated also the ability of the government to protect the common welfare and the good of this country. And I do think, before we face a devastating event that really is going to, I think, vividly demonstrate to everybody just how dependent we are on that environment, we really need to have a real, true national debate on this,” he said.
Mackenzie Weinger is a national security reporter at The Cipher Brief.
