– THE CYBER COMMAND

 

* Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander is the current head of the USA National Security Agency – NSA. The agency is in charge on gathering intelligence from all kinds of electronic signals, whether it is Radio, radars, telephones, web and internet and all kinds of radiation produced from electronic devices, known as sigint (signal intelligence).

One of the expertise of NSA are to break into military and other secret communication nets all over the world, to crack the codes and to monitor the electronic trafficking unnoticed by its legal users. As such Gen. Keith Alexander is the perfect choice to protect the 7,000 military communication networks and data bases of the USA Armed Forces crucial for its functioning. The new headquarters, likely to be based at Fort Meade, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C., will be responsible for defending USA military systems but not other USA government or private networks, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said.

Indeed Gen. Keith Alexander was nominated, on Friday 06/26/2009, by USA Defense Secretary Robert Gates, as the first head of a new command in USA the ‘Cyber Command’.  In a memo last week, Gates said the nation’s increasing dependency on cyberspace, alongside a growing array of cyber threats and vulnerabilities, adds a new element of risk to national security. A Cyber Command is already operating within USA Air Force. It remains unclear whether the new Cyber Command will include the Air Force Command too. 

There are few reasons why so sudden and why now. The first is Air France flight no 447, which disappeared unexplainable in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on 06/01/2009. Although it is not yet clear what happened in the last minutes it is assumed that some sort of malfunction in the computerized system of the plain caused its crashing. The question whether it was a programming failure or a deliberate accident remains open. 

The second reason is the unrest in Iran, following the general elections of 06/12/2009. The Iranian security and intelligence apparatuses were extremely skilled and prepared for disinformation, to monitor the web  and its trafficking in Iran and outside Iran and there are many signs that they were able to intercept an decode the communication between the UK embassy in Teheran and London including information related to operations of MI6 (British Intelligence Service) in Iran. It is most likely the reason of the deep diplomatic crisis between Iran and UK nowadays (see – Khameneis Speech).

USA finally realized that what she did in monitoring sigint trafficking all over the world can be easily implemented on USA itself.

 

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