1,000 jobs headed to fort meade under cyber security

'we don't wanna defend the net' (we want to fight the net)
from baltimore business journal: There are still more questions than answers, but information trickling out from the Pentagon is giving a clearer sense for what the military’s cyber security headquarters at Fort George G. Meade will look like.

The U.S. Defense Department now says about 1,000 people will work at Fort Meade in defense of the nation’s information networks, under the direction of National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander. Alexander’s U.S. Cyber Command was officially established May 21, when he was sworn in as its head.

Here’s how Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn III put it in a May 21 interview with reporters, according to American Forces Press Service: “It will be the place where the Department of Homeland Security will come to on cybersecurity matters. And it will help rationalize the interagency process.”

A good portion of Cyber Command’s workers will be shifted from other military bases to Fort Meade, but Alexander could need to hire more workers than are already fending off cyberterrorists and hacking into foreign computer networks for Uncle Sam.

It’s unclear just what the new agency will look like, how much space it will take up at Fort Meade, or how many private contracting jobs might be created in support of USCYBERCOM (that’s its former Pentagon name, just like U.S. Strategic Command is known as USSTRATCOM).

pentagon's cybercom preps war against the american people

from kurt nimmo: NSA Director Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander told the Senate Armed Services Committee in April that he would work to protect the privacy rights of Americans online. It was an interesting comment from a man who heads up an organization responsible for a massive program of illegal dragnet surveillance of domestic communications and communications records of millions of ordinary Americans since at least 2001.

“NSA is the only place in the U.S. government that has the capabilities we need for defense of the private networks,” James A. Lewis, a senior fellow and cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the CIA’s favorite newspaper last year. “We need to find a way to use those capabilities without putting civil liberties at risk.” CSIS is an insider think tank dominated by the likes of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft, Henry Kissinger and other freedom lovers.

Threats against computer networks in the United States are grossly exaggerated. Dire reports issued by the Defense Science Board and the Center for Strategic and International Studies “are usually richer in vivid metaphor — with fears of ‘digital Pearl Harbors’ and ‘cyber-Katrinas’ — than in factual foundation,” writes Evgeny Morozov, a Belarus-born researcher and blogger who writes on the political effects of the internet.

Morozov notes that much of the data on the supposed cyber threat “are gathered by ultra-secretive government agencies — which need to justify their own existence — and cyber-security companies — which derive commercial benefits from popular anxiety.”

On Friday Alexander was appointed to head up the newly activated Cyber Command, a subordinate unified command under United States Strategic Command “designed to conduct virtual combat across the world’s computer networks,” according to The Guardian. The ceremony held at Fort Meade, Maryland, was “low-key” in order to not draw media attention.

Early last week the Air Force assigned approximately 30,000 “digital troops” to “the front lines of cyber warfare,” a number that represents a third of the troops in Afghanistan. “The transformation is part of the service’s larger emphasis on cyberspace operations and merging most computer system operations and network warfare functions under Space Command’s 24th Air Force, based at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas,” reported the Air Force Times on May 19.

flashback: military response to cyber attack 'possible'