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The move to elevate Cyber Command to a full Unified Combatant Command and split it off from the National Security Agencyshows that cyber intelligence collection and information war are rapidly diverging fields. The future leadership of both entities is now in question, but the Pentagon has set out a conditions-based approach to the breakup. That represents a partial victory for the man who directs both Cyber Command and the NSA.

The move would mean that the head of Cyber Command would answer directly to the Defense Secretary and the National Security Agency would get its own head. Its a move that many have said is long overdue, and its exact timing remains unknown. So what does the split mean for the Pentagon, for Cyber Command, and for the future of U.S. cyber security?

The split will give the commander of Cyber Command central authority over resource allocation, training, operational planning and mission execution. The commander will answer to the Defense secretary directly, not the head of Strategic Command. The decision means that Cyber Command will play an even more strategic role in synchronizing cyber forces and training, conducting and coordinating military cyberforce operations and advocating for and prioritizing cyber investments within the department, said Kenneth Rapuano, assistant defense secretary for Homeland Defense and Global Security.

The Start of a Process

The move announced on Friday fulfills a mandate in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2017. Former Defense Secretary Ash Carter hinted at the split back in May 2016. But it wont happen immediately.

Instead, Defense Secretary James Mattis and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joe Dunford will nominate a flag officer to take over the new Cyber Command as well as the NSA. That person could be Adm. Michael Rogers, who currently heads both, or someone else. Trump has reportedly asked Mattis to give him the name of a nominee.Speculation has focused on Army Lt. Gen. William Mayville as the nominee to head Cyber Command.

Once that new person is nominated and confirmed and once Mattis and Dunford are satisfied that splitting the two entities will not hamper the ability of either Cyber Command or the NSA to conduct their missions independently, only then will Cyber Command and the NSA actually split.

What Does it Mean for Leadership?

Read one way, the announcement means Rogers will lose power. Even were he to become the nominee to the new elevated Cyber Command, he would still wind up losing the NSA eventually. If he were to stay on as head of NSA after the confirmation of a new Cyber Command head, as expected, he would briefly serve under Mayville until the formal split.

Read another way, the lack of a concrete timetable for the split, despite such a requirement in the authorization bill, represents a partial win for Rogers.

Rogers took over the NSA and Cyber Command in the spring of 2014. He has been resistant to the idea of a split, telling lawmakers in September that U.S. national security benefitted from the dual-hat arrangement. This view was not shared by then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper nor then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter. Rogers resistance was one of many issues that rubbed them the wrong way.

It got so bad that in November, unnamed sources told The Washington Post that Clapper and Carter were urging President Barack Obama to fire Rogers.

The truth is a bit more nuanced. Clappers goal was to split the NSA from CyberCom. He was not a strong advocate of removal, but was willing to defer to [the Secretary of Defense] if Carter felt strongly about selecting new leadership at Cyber Command, a source inside the intelligence community said. There were other concerns unrelated to the potential split.

Rogers outlasted both Clapper, who had long planned to retire at the end of the Obama administration; and Carter, a political appointee. Rogers attitude toward an NSA-Cyber Command split evolved. In May, he testified that he would support a split was done in a way that did not hamper either the NSA or Cyber Command.

The manner in which the split was announced is in keeping with what Rogers has said he wanted.

The move toward a conditions-based split also met with the approval of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz, a longtime Rogers ally. I appreciate the administrations commitment today to ensuring that a future separation of the so-called dual hat relationship between Cyber Command and the National Security Agency will be based on conditions, rather than arbitrary political timelines, McCain said in a statement. While Cyber Command and the National Security Agency should eventually be able to operate independent of one another, the administration must work closely with the Congress to take the necessary steps that will make this separation of responsibilities successful, and to ensure that each agency will emerge more effective and more capable as a result.

What It Means for Cyber Command, the NSA, and Cyber Operations

The elevation of Cyber Command represents a big step forward for the militarys cyber ability, but it has yet to be catch up to the NSA in terms of collecting signals intelligence or creating network accesses, according to Bill Leigher, who as a rear admiral helped stand up Navy Fleet Cyber Command. Leigher, who now directs government cyber solutions for Raytheon, applauds the split because the NSA, which collects foreign intelligence, and Cyber Command, a warfighting outfit, have fundamentally different missions.This caused tension between the two organizations under one roof. Information collected for intelligence gathering may be useful in a way thats fundamentally different from intelligence for military purposes, he says. If you collecting intelligence, its foreign espionage. You dont want to get caught. The measure of success is: collect intelligence and dont get caught. If youre going to war, I would argue that the measure of performance is what we do has to have the characteristics of a legal weapon in the context of war and the commander has to know what he or she uses it.

This puts the agencies in disagreement about how to use intel and tools that they share. From an NSA perspective, cyber really is about gaining access to networks. From aCyber Command point of view, I would argue, its about every piece of software on the battlefield and having the means to prevent that software from working the way it was intended to work [for the adversary], he said.

The split will allow the agencies to pursue the very different tools, operations, and rules each of their missions requires, he said. Expect NSA to intensify its focus on developing access for intelligence, and Cyber Command to prepare to rapidly deploy massive cyber effects at scale during military operations and shut down the enemy. Both of this will likely leverage next-generation artificial intelligence but in very different ways said Leigher.

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What the Announced NSA / Cyber Command Split Means

The Uttar Pradesh police is considering a case under the stringent National Security Act against a person accused of stalking a minor girl and chopping off one of her hands in a brutal sword attack in Lakhimpur Kheri district.

The accused, identified as Rohit Chaurasia, allegedly attacked the minor girl in broad daylight with a sword on Wednesday completely severing her left hand, while heavily damaging her right hand. She also suffered injuries to her head.

The attack took place near a busy market place in Lakhimpur.

According to locals, the accused chased down the girl and first struck her on the head, after which he targetted her limbs and chopped off her left hand completely.

He was on the verge of dismembering her right hand too when locals overpowered him and handed him over to the police.

The victim, who suffered immense blood loss, was referred to Lucknow for treatment. Incidentally, after an 11-hour surgery, doctors at the King George Medical University managed to fix back her hand, said Dr. A. K. Singh, head of the hospital's plastic surgery department on Thursday.

The victim will be kept under observation for one week as the condition of the repaired hand is delicate, Dr. Singh said.

The victim's right hand was also injured in the attack, with damages to its flexon tendon, fingers, palm and nerve fibres, the KGMU said.

The accused, who was the victim's neighbour, was sent to jail. He was booked for attempt to murder, assaulting a woman with intent to outrage her modesty and voluntarily causing grievous hurt by dangerous weapon.

Relevant clauses of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act were also invoked, said S. Chinappa, Superintendent of Police, Kheri.

Taking maximum action

The accused would be additionally booked under the NSA.

Asked on what ground was the police invoking NSA, Mr. Chinappa told The Hindu: "We are taking the maximum action in this case. It is a heinous crime, it can have [an impact] on society."

The motive behind the attack is still not clear though the family of the girl alleged that the accused had been harassing her for a while.

The police, however, said the two got engaged in an altercation over a mobile charger leading to the attack that has left the district near the Indo-Nepal border in a state of shock.

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Alleged stalker chops off girl's hand, to face NSA charge - The Hindu

Published time: 24 Aug, 2017 11:29 Edited time: 24 Aug, 2017 17:15

Details of an alleged CIA project that allows the agency to secretly extract biometric data from liaison services such as the NSA, the DHS and the FBI have been published by WikiLeaks.

Documents from the CIAs ExpressLane project were released by the whistleblowing organization as part of its ongoing Vault 7 series on the intelligence agencys alleged hacking capabilities.

Abranchwithin the CIA known as Office of Technical Services (OTS) provides a biometric collection system to liaison services around the world with the expectation for sharing of the biometric takes collected on the systems, according to afilereleased by WikiLeaks.

ExpressLane, however, suggests the system has inadequacies as it was developed as a covert information collection tool to secretly exfiltrate data collections from such systems provided to liaison services.

The user guide for the tool states that it was developed to support the branch in its efforts to verify that this data is also being shared with the agency.

ExpressLane v3.1.1 provides an ability to disable the biometric software if liaison doesnt provide the Agency with continued access.

ExpressLane is installed and run under the guise of upgrading the biometric software by OTS agents that visit the liaison sites.

OTS/i2c plans to revisit these sites with the cover of upgrading the biometric software to perform a collection against the biometric takes, a CIA document outlining test procedures for the project states.

Liaison officers overseeing this procedure will remain unsuspicious, as the data exfiltration is disguised behind a Windows installation splash screen.

ExpressLane was intended to remain secret until 2034, according to the files which originate from 2009.

The core components of the OTS system are based on products from Cross Match a US company specializing in biometric software for law enforcement and the Intelligence Community.

In 2011, it was reported that the US military used one of the companys products to identify Osama bin Laden during the assassination operation in Pakistan.

The White House and Department of Defense said facial recognition technology was one of the techniques used to identify Bin Laden but Cross Matchs involvement was not confirmed.

READ MORE: CIA CouchPotato tool captures video stream images remotely WikiLeaks

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CIA's secret spy tool helps agency steal data from NSA & FBI, WikiLeaks reveals - RT

President Donald Trumps elevation of U.S. Cyber Command to a full Unified Combatant Command amps up the powers of a national security unit that has taken center stage amid widening questions about Russian meddling in the 2016 elections.

This new Unified Combatant Command will strengthen our cyberspace operations and create more opportunities to improve our Nations defense, Trump announced in a statementon Friday.

Thepresidents move makes Cyber Command formerly a subordinate command unit under U.S. Strategic Command the 10th unified command in the U.S. military.Cyber Command was first established in 2009 on the orders of then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates to handle the U.S. militarys cyber operations.

Currently, both the National Security Agency and Cyber Command are overseen by Adm. Mike Rogers in a dual-hat role. As part of Trumps announcement, Secretary of Defense James Mattis is conducting a review to determine whether Cyber Command should be separated from the NSA.

The move aims to expand Americas war-fighting strategy: U.S. officials say cyberattacks are part of the military doctrine for Russia, whose interference in the 2016 elections is a focus of House and Senate intelligence committee probes, among other investigations.

But some critics say that removing CYBERCOM from the oversight of the NSA director could lead to information-sharing concerns.

Jamil Jaffer, founder of the National Security Institute at George Mason Universitys Antonin Scalia Law School and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, said that there is little opposition to a unified Cyber Command. But Jaffer added that there has been an ongoing debate over whether and how CYBERCOM should be split off from the NSA.

Ive always thought it made sense to dual-hat the NSA director and the Cyber Command commander because then they can appropriately balance the intelligence gains and losses, Jaffer said in a phone interview Friday. I think when you separate them, then you have competing equities.

Jaffer said a split could have the unintended consequence of slowing down the efficiency of both operations.

I do think its important to have the offensive and defensive cyber capabilities that Cyber Command has, while also ensuring we preserve NSAs signals intelligence capabilities, Jaffer added.

There is bipartisan support in Congress for Cyber Command to receive more independent operational authority, and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle offered support for the decision.

Sen. John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, praised the announcement. But the Arizona Republican added there is much more to be done to prepare our nation and our military to meet our cybersecurity challenges.

While Cyber Command and the National Security Agency should eventually be able to operate independent of one another, the administration must work closely with the Congress to take the necessary steps that will make this separation of responsibilities successful, and to ensure that each agency will emerge more effective and more capable as a result, McCain said in a statement Friday.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, echoed McCains statement and said in his own Friday statement that the elevation of Cyber Command should also facilitate the eventual division of CYBERCOM from the NSA, a step that I believe is in the interests of both entities.

Trumps announcement fulfills a mandate in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2017 to promote Cyber Command and place it on equal footing with the other combatant commands.

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After Cyber Command Elevation, Split From NSA Could Be Next - Morning Consult

Utilizing recently unlocked information from data that purportedly originated on the DNCs servers, Binney claimed that he is something like 99% sure that the DNC servers were not hacked from the outside. He urged the U.S. Intelligence Community to immediately release any evidence utilized to draw the conclusion that Russia may have been associated with the breach of the DNC servers.

Binney was an architect of the NSAs surveillance program. He is a former NSA technical director who helped to modernize the agencys worldwide eavesdropping network, co-founding a unit on automating NSA signals intelligence. He became a famed whistleblower when he resigned on October 31, 2001, after spending more than 30 years with the agency.

He is also a senior leader of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), a group of former officers of the United States Intelligence Community founded in 2003. During the interview, Binney repeatedly referred to a forensic analysis conducted by VIPS members on DNC files posted online by the hacker known as Guccifer 2.0. The VIPS analysis highlighted data that purportedly indicated the DNC server was most likely not hacked from the outside.

Binneys findings are not without detractors, however, with some experts saying the VIPS report is flawed and ignores other explanations for the metadata. Binney pushed back against the criticism, charging the detractors have no evidence for their claims. He squarely placed the onus on the U.S. government to prove any hack.

He was speaking on this reporters Sunday radio program, Aaron Klein Investigative Radio, broadcast on New Yorks AM 970 The Answer and Philadelphias NewsTalk 990 AM.

The VIPS analysis was made possible after an independent researcher who goes by the online name of Forensicator found a way to unlock metadata from Guccifer 2.0s files.

The unlocked metadata shows that on July 5, 2016 a total of 1,976 megabytes of data were quickly downloaded into a file. A key finding is that the file downloads took only 87 seconds in total, which suggests a transfer rate of 22.7 megabytes per second.

A hack of the DNC server would have most likely used an Internet service provider. However, the analysts noted, in mid-2016 U.S. Internet service providers for residential clients did not have speeds capable of downloading data at that rate. The data upload is consistent with a regular transfer to a flash device like a thumb drive.

Yet, the VIPS report seemingly overlooked the fact that some corporate and cloud networks do have upload rates technically capable of transferring at that speed. The DNC has not commented on its own network speeds.

Speaking to this reporter, Binney stated, It is almost absolutely not possible to do it from outside. I mean you have to have some access to the DNC network and some access from there that would allow you to take that rate in. That meant you had to be on the DNC network or some very high-speed network connected to it.

Binney stated that if the data were transferred via the Internet, outside entities would have recordings of the transfer. The network managers would monitor the network log for the Internet, for example, he said. Basically, the people who manage the fiber optic lines. Like AT&T. If they saw a bulge in traffic being passed down one line they could see that maybe we need to offload to another line and reroute. Its like load-leveling across the entire network to make sure that it functions and it doesnt go down for being overloaded on one line only.

Binney, who helped build the NSAs surveillance program, alleged that the NSA would have picked up on any outside hack of the DNC.

They would know exactly where the package went if it were transferred. I would also add that, on the other end, NSA and GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), the British equivalent, are watching [WikiLeaks founder] Julian Assange in the embassy and all of the people who are related to him or are contacting him or having any kind of data transfer to or from him.

Theyre watching them all thats Wikileaks, basically they are watching them 24 hours a day cast iron. So, if anybody passed data to them across the network they would know. And be reporting it. Thats the whole problem. They didnt come out and say here is where the data came from that came to Wikileaks. And he is where it came from the DNC server to that point that is related to Wikileaks.

The Hill, however, quoted experts saying the VIP report overlooked other scenarios that could explain the quick transfer rate. This theory assumes that the hacker downloaded the files to a computer and then leaked it from that computer, Rich Barger, director of security research at Splunk, told the publication.

The Hill report continued:

But, said Barger and other experts, that overlooks the possibility the files were copied multiple times before being released, something that may be more probable than not in a bureaucracy like Russian intelligence.

A hacker might have downloaded it to one computer, then shared it by USB to an air gapped [off the internet] network for translation, then copied by a different person for analysis, then brought a new USB to an entirely different air gapped computer to determine a strategy all before it was packaged for Guccifer 2.0 to leak, said Barger.

Speaking to this reporter, Binney allowed that the files may have been copied multiple times before being posted by Guccifer 2.0. But he stated there is no proof that that was the case one way or the other. We should never infer anything without at least one fact to indicate its true, he replied.I would say again, if anything happened like these suggested events then NSA would have a trace on at least most of it. They have produced no information at all.

Besides the rate of transfer, here are some other findings from the unlock metadata included in the VIPS report:

The July date, however, is actually months after the DNC said they first registered a breach in April.Binney stated that it was possible the date and timestamp could have been changed.

The Nation related that possibility in a 4,500-word story on the VIPS analysis:

In addition, there is the adulteration of the documents Guccifer 2.0 posted on June 15, when he made his first appearance. This came to light when researchers penetrated what Folden calls Guccifers top layer of metadata and analyzed what was in the layers beneath. They found that the first five files Guccifer made public had each been run, via ordinary cut-and-paste, through a single template that effectively immersed them in what could plausibly be cast as Russian fingerprints. They were not: The Russian markings were artificially inserted prior to posting. Its clear, another forensics investigator self-identified as HET, wrote in a report on this question, that metadata was deliberately altered and documents were deliberately pasted into a Russianified Word document with Russian language settings and style headings.

The magazine points out that the CIAs cyber-tools would have allowed such an encoding. WikiLeaks began to release in March and labeled Vault 7 includes one called Marble that is capable of obfuscating the origin of documents in false-flag operations and leaving markings that point to whatever the CIA wants to point to.

The Nation story on the VIPS report is reportedly being reviewed by the publication. Were doing the review as we speak, and I dont want to rush to say anything, Katrina vanden Heuvel, the Nations editor and publisher, told the Washington Post earlier this month. The Post reported that the Nations review will include the technical feasibility of the article detailing the VIPS report.

The Gufficer 2.0 files are a key part of the Russia hacking narrative. AJanuary 6, 2017 U.S. Intelligence Communityreport alleging Russian government interference in the 2016 presidential campaign states this of the Gufficer 2.0 files:

We assess with high confidence that Russian military intelligence (General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate or GRU) used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets and relayed material to WikiLeaks.

The U.S. Intelligence Community has not publicly released any evidence to back up its charges. Despite false media characterizations of 17 intelligence agencies, the January 6 report was authored by three U.S. agencies the NSA, the FBI and the CIA.TheWashington Post,in its extensive June 23article, reported on details of the compartmentalized operation that indicates a high degree of secrecy involving top Obama administration officials.

A Bloomberg opinion piece by Leonid Bershidsky asserted that Binneys information should get more attention.

Bershidsky wrote:

Unlike the current and former intelligence officials anonymously quoted in stories about the Trump-Russia scandal, VIPS members actually have names. But their findings and doubts are only being aired bynon-mainstreampublicationsthat are easy to accuse of being channels for Russian disinformation. The Nation, Consortium News, ZeroHedge and other outlets have pointed totheir findings that at least some of the DNC files were taken by an insider rather than by hackers, Russian or otherwise.

In response to the Nation report, the DNC released the following statement:

U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded the Russian government hacked the DNC in an attempt to interfere in the election. Any suggestion otherwise is false and is just another conspiracy theory like those pushed by Trump and his administration. Its unfortunate that the Nation has decided to join the conspiracy theorists to push this narrative.

During the radio interview, Binney pushed back against the DNC conspiracy theory charge.

They are joining the lie, Binney stated. I mean, it is an outright lie. All they are saying is they are claiming something. Where is any substance from anybody to prove any of that? There isnt any. They havent given any proof whatsoever.

The intelligence community has said it is highly likely. Well, they should absolutely know with all of the taps they have on the fiber lines in the U.S. and around the world. They should have no question whatsoever. Saying high confidence that means that they dont know. Thats really what they are saying. If they have anything else to say, let them produce any evidence that they have so that we can all look at it. So far, they have produced nothing but opinion and speculation and a lie to keep this Cold War going.

In a move that has raised eyebrows, the DNC did not allow the FBI to inspect its servers.

In Januarytestimonybefore the Senate Intelligence Committee, then-FBI Director James Comey confirmed that the FBI registered multiple requests at different levels to review the DNCs hacked servers. Ultimately, the DNC and FBI came to an agreement in which a highly respected private company would carry out forensics on the servers and share any information that it discovered with the FBI, Comey testified.

A senior law enforcement officialstressedthe importance of the FBI gaining direct access to the servers, a request that was denied by the DNC.

The FBI repeatedly stressed to DNC officials the necessity of obtaining direct access to servers and data, only to be rebuffed until well after the initial compromise had been mitigated, the official was quoted by the news media as saying.

This left the FBI no choice but to rely upon a third party for information. These actions caused significant delays and inhibited the FBI from addressing the intrusion earlier.

Comeys statement about a highly respected private company gaining access to the DNC servers was a reference to CrowdStrike, the third-party company ultimately relied upon by the FBI to make its assessment about alleged Russian hacking into the DNC.

As this reporterdocumented, CrowdStrike was financed to the tune of $100 millionfrom a funding drive last year led by Google Capital.

Google Capital, which now goes by the name of CapitalG, is an arm of Alphabet Inc., Googles parent company. Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Alphabet, has been a staunch and active supporter of Hillary Clinton and is a longtime donor to the Democratic Party.

CrowdStrikeis a California-based cybersecurity technology company co-founded by experts George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch.

Alperovitch is anonresident seniorfellow of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council. The Council takes a hawkish approach toward Russia and has releasednumerous reportsand briefs about Russian aggression.

The Council isfundedby the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Inc., the U.S. State Department and NATO ACT.

Another Councilfunderis the Ploughshares Fund, which in turn has received financing from billionaire George Soros Open Society Foundations.

Aaron Klein is Breitbarts Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, Aaron Klein Investigative Radio. Follow him onTwitter @AaronKleinShow.Follow him onFacebook.

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EXCLUSIVE NSA Whistleblower: Russia 'Hack' of DNC Server an 'Outright Lie' - Breitbart News