For almost five years, the White House’s inability to publish a new National Security Strategy (NSS) seemed to confirm the suspicions of the US national security commentariat that the Obama administration lacks effective strategies to deal with the security crises across the globe. But last weekend, the NSS 2015 finally came out, and although high on platitudes, what followed on Tuesday could yet be Barack Obama’s biggest national security legacy. Lisa Monaco, the homeland security advisor, announced that the US is setting up a new intelligence unit — the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Centre — to coordinate cyber threat analysis.
The gamechanger is the attack on Sony Pictures, blamed on North Korea but detected late. Assessing that the world was at a “transformational moment” vis-a-vis cyber threats, Monaco revealed “data breaches have increased roughly fivefold since 2009”. But the need for a separate agency is being questioned. The administration’s defence is that the new unit will not overlap with existing ones that investigate and disrupt cyber attacks, such as the National Security Agency (NSA), Department of Homeland Security, FBI and the military’s Cyber Command. Instead, it will feed them real-time intelligence on cyber breaches, streamlining the process and filling a “critical gap”, as no US agency currently makes coordinated cyber threat assessments.
