6 April 2015

DON’T LET AMERICA BE BOXED IN BY ITS OWN COMPUTERS

BY GEN. (RET.) MICHAEL HAYDEN
April 3, 2015

Michael V. Hayden is a principal at the Chertoff Group, a security and risk management advisory firm with clients in the technology sector. He was director of the National Security Agency from 1995 to 2005 and the Central Intelligence Agency from 2006 to 2009.

As director of the National Security Agency and then the Central Intelligence Agency after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, I fought to provide our intelligence officers with every possible advantage in their work to detect and confront threats from our enemies.

We were entering a new kind of conflict. I had grown to professional maturity in an era in which it was NATO vs. the Soviet Union, and our enemy – with its tank divisions in Eastern Europe and intercontinental ballistic missile silos in our sights – was easy to find, though hard to defeat. Today, our enemies are relatively easy to defeat, but they often are damnably difficult to find. Hence the need to create timely, actionable – even exquisite – intelligence.

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