The brief // by Ben FrankelDeterring cyberwar, police gear and the law, guarding the guardians
Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described the current U.S. cyberdefense policy as “too predictable”; he added that “[the current policy is] purely defensive. There is no penalty for attacking us now. We have to figure out a way to change that”; he said the new U.S. cyberdefense policy is the first step toward correcting current deficiencies; a Massachusetts company is selling local police forces a new iPhone app that scans a suspect’s iris and matches it to a national database of felons; there are questions about whether or not this app — which costs $3,000 — violates the Constitutional prohibition of unreasonable searches; the former mayor, the police chief, and member of the city council of a New Mexico border town have been charged with smuggling guns to the Mexican cartels; some of these guns have been linked to at least eight murders in Mexico
Here are three comments on things we noted this past week;
1. Deterring cyberattacks
Yesterday, William Lynn, the outgoing deputy secretary of defense, outlined a new U.S. cyberdefense strategy. His key point: the new strategy is defensive and it focuses on “denying [the attacker] the benefit of an attack.” Lynn added: “If an attack will not have its intended effect, those who wish us harm will have less reason to target us through cyberspace in the first place.”.
Hours before Lynn’s presentation, Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described the current cyberdefense policy as “too predictable.”
According to the Washington Post, he told defense reporters that “[the current policy is] purely defensive. There is no penalty for attacking us now. We have to figure out a way to change that.”
Cartwright said that stronger deterrents would be needed. “We are supposed to be offshore convincing people if they attack, it won’t be free,” he said. The adversaries should know that the United States has “the capability and capacity to do something about it.”
The Post notes that hours after his remarks, Cartwright, appeared with Lynn at a news conference after the new strategy rollout, describing the cyber plan as a first step. “This starts us down the path of building out both our defenses and our awareness skills,” he said. He added that eventually, more aggressive cyber tactics, as well as legal and diplomatic measures, would be needed to “raise the price” of attacking.
The Post notes that Stewart Baker, a former National Security Agency general counsel, in a blog post compared the Pentagon’s new cyber defense plan to a nuclear deterrent strategy of building more fallout shelters. “This is at best a partial strategy,” he wrote. “The plan as described fails to engage on the hard issues, such as offense and attribution and, well, winning.”
2. New law enforcement technology tests law
The Wall Street Journal reports that a Plymouth, Massachusetts-based BI2 Technologies is now selling law enforcement agencies around the United States an iPhone application which allows police officers to do an iris scan of individuals they stop on the street or in their cars - and have the iris matched against a data base of felons.
The data base — called the Mobile Offender Recognition and Information System (MORIS) — is sold together with the application. It has been built by BI2, and contains face and iris data collected when people are admitted to or released from a correctional facility.
As is the case with other technological advances which law enforcement has rushed to adopt — for example, GPS tracking devices which may be surreptitiously attached to a suspect’s car — it is not clear whether or not the iris scan app, which requires the police officer to scan the suspect’s iris from five inches away, violates Constitutional prohibition of unreasonable searches.
Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University, told the Wall Street Journal that the use of these advanced technologies remains “a gray area of the law.” He added: “A warrant might be required to force someone to open their eyes.”
PoliceOne reports that BI2 has has already agreed to sell the application and the data base to about forty law enforcement agencies. The agreements so far total 1,000 devices, which cost $3,000 each..
The Wall Street Journal notes that the purchase of some of the devices is funded through grants directed by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services.
3. Who will guard the guardians
On Tuesday, Eddie Espinoza, the former mayor of the border town of the village of Columbus on the border between New Mexico and Mexico, pleased guilty to gun smuggling charges.
The charges stem from arrests made by the police back in March, in which Espinoza, Columbus Chief of Police Angelo Vega, and Village Trustee Blas Gutierez were nabbed. They are accused of smuggling more than 200 guns from the United States to cartel members in Ciudad Juarez and Palomas.
ATF agents have been following the smuggling operation for more than a year, and guns the group supplied the cartels are linked to at least eight killings in the two cities.
The three could face up to fifty years in prison.
Ben Frankel is editor of the Homeland Security NewsWire
