Grant Slater / MNS
Gen. Keith Alexander testifies before the House Armed Services committee on Thursday. The general asked for more authority to access Internet infrastructure.
WASHINGTON _ In his first Capitol Hill appearance since the U.S. Cyber Command began full operations recently, the head of the new command told a House committee Thursday that he planned to ask Congress for permission to operate more freely on the Internet.
Gen. Keith Alexander, who also heads the National Security Agency, said the command, based in Fort Meade, Md., is growing and needs new powers to accomplish its mission.
“Right now, the White House is leading a discussion on what authorities we need,” Alexander said in testimony restrained by its classified nature. He did not elaborate on what authority the command center would seek.
Alexander acknowledged concerns about privacy and civil liberties as the military and intelligence agencies expand their presence on the networks that also form the backbone of private industry in the United States.
Business groups and advocates for civil liberties have expressed concern that the government would seek to regulate that space in the name of national security.
“A lot of people bring up privacy and civil liberties,” Alexander said. “I say, ‘What specifically are you concerned about?’”
He pointed out that people don’t complain that antivirus programs are violating their civil liberties when they scan computers for worms or malicious software.
“We have a responsibility to protect the civil liberties of the American people that is nonnegotiable,” he said.
Jim Harper, information policy director at the libertarian Cato Institute, said the military must restrict itself to the protection of military domains and possibly the network infrastructure of the federal government.
Alexander mentioned the need to create a secure zone for vital infrastructure like the country’s financial system to operate. But Harper said this is a step to far and beyond the military’s mandate to protect the United States.
“Those are not national security interests,” Harper said. “If those are, then we have a hard time finding anything that’s not.”
When the Cyber Command reaches full capacity in the next year, it will employ up to 1,100 civilian and military personnel.
The new command combines two now-defunct military departments that maintained the Defense Department’s global networks and secured them.
Alexander, who added the new command to his responsibilities in May, said he hoped the new organization would be more efficient allowing it to operate within its budget of $120 million, a figure that may increase to $150 million next year.
In laying out the nature of the threat the United States faces on the Web, Alexander replied to a question asking if most of the attacks come from “14- to 15-year-old white boys who have gone off-reservation.”
Alexander pointed to a 2007 incident in which Russian nationalists bombarded the official Web sites of Estonia in a diplomatic dispute over the a Soviet-era war memorial.
In 2008, rumors of a cyber attack followed closely on the heels of the conflict between Russia and Georgia. Early this year, Chinese hackers gleaned personal information of activists from Google prompting the company to pull out of the country.
The Defense Department’s networks are probed roughly 250,000 times every hour, he said.