John Bolton has edged towards more public comment on National Security Presidential Memorandum 13 which he says minimizes the “procedural restrictions on undertaking offensive cyber operations". Ellen Nakashima, who has good sources in Cyber operations, wrote the piece for the Washington Post. Quoting Bolton she said,"“The objective here is not to have unrestricted cyberwarfare. The objective is to create structures of deterrence by making our adversaries understand that when they engage in offensive cyberactivity themselves, they will bear a disproportionate cost.”
There are two aspects to this that I really do not like. First, putting this kind of activity in the hands of Cyber Command is putting it in the military arm of government, something that is not wise since the telecommunications infrastructure is not military. Second, making it less difficult to launch operations makes deconfliction with other intelligence related cyber operations more difficult. One day we will look back on this and wonder why we ever put these kind of operations in the hands of military planners instead of the intelligence community.
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