Category Archives: Diplomacy

Rex Tillerson proposes new ‘cyber bureau’ at the State Department

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Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has a plan to create a new “cyber bureau” within the State Department that would focus on building relationships with foreign governments to coordinate on international cybersecurity priorities, according to a letter sent Tuesday to the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The proposition first surfaced publicly during a committee hearing Tuesday on the state of U.S. cyber diplomacy. Former State Department Cybersecurity Coordinator Christopher Painter and former Pentagon cybersecurity adviser Michael Sulmeyer criticized Tillerson for shuttering one such office, which Painter previously oversaw, last year during a myriad other cuts. “The Department of State must be organized to lead diplomatic efforts related to all aspects of cyberspace,” says Tillerson’s letter to committee Chairman Edward Royce, R-Calif. Since Tillerson took the helm, the State Department’s cyber diplomacy mission had been consolidated and wrapped into the Bureau of Economic Affairs’ Office of International Communications and Information Policy. The decision was […]

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Cyber diplomacy office at State Department would return under House-passed bill

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With the passage of the Cyber Diplomacy Act in the House of Representatives, Congress took the first step Wednesday in reestablishing a State Department office that was dedicated to developing global norms for digital espionage and more. The bipartisan bill, which passed by voice vote, has garnered support from both sides of the aisle. It would codify and expand the capabilities of the Office of the Cybersecurity Coordinator, which was created in 2011 but abolished last year after Secretary of State Rex Tillerson decided to merge it with the department’s larger Bureau of Economic Affairs. Senators have shown interest in the idea of reestablishing the office, but it’s unclear if the House bill will move in that chamber. Insiders say the shuttering of the cyber office effectively downgraded the State Department’s diplomatic mission for the development of norms for cyberspace — including, for example, debating foreign governments on what should be considered a legitimate target […]

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The confrontation that fueled the fallout between Kaspersky and the U.S. government

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The United States’ hostile relationship with Moscow-based cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab may have been partially shaped by an incident two years ago in which an eyebrow-raising Kaspersky sales pitch eventually led to a secret and previously undisclosed confrontation between Russian intelligence and the CIA. The confrontation, which ended in Russia’s domestic intelligence agency issuing a diplomatic démarche, was the result of the U.S. government’s intrusive treatment of the Russian company and helped set off a chain of events that is still unfolding today, according to multiple people with knowledge of the matter. These officials spoke to CyberScoop anonymously in order to freely discuss the sensitive nature of the ongoing saga. In the first half of 2015, Kaspersky was making aggressive sales pitches to numerous U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and NSA, multiple U.S. officials told CyberScoop. The sales pitch caught officials’ attention inside the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division […]

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How China’s cyber command is being built to supersede its U.S. military counterpart

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As U.S. leaders contemplate a proper definition for “cyberwar,” their counterparts in China have been building a unit capable of fighting such a large-scale conflict. China’s rival to U.S. Cyber Command, the ambiguously named Strategic Support Force (SSF), is quietly growing at a time when the country’s sizable military is striving to excel in the digital domain. Though the American government is widely considered to be one of the premier hacking powers — alongside Israel, Germany, Russia and the United Kingdom — China is rapidly catching up by following a drastically different model. The SSF uniquely conducts several different missions simultaneously that in the U.S. would be happening at the National Security Agency, Army, Air Force, Department of Homeland Security, NASA, State Department and Cyber Command, among others. If you combined all of those government entities and added companies like Intel, Boeing and Google to the mix, then you would come close to how the […]

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EU countries agree to collectively punish attacker when a member is hacked

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The European Union’s 28-nation bloc is in agreement concerning how to punish hackers. On Monday, the European Council announced a joint framework, dubbed the “cyber diplomacy toolbox,” to guide how member countries should uniformly respond to malicious cyber activity, which includes steps to cooperatively impose economic sanctions, travel bans, asset freezes and blanket bans against responsible parties. “The key principle here is proportionality,” an EU official told CyberScoop. “It is EU member states who would decide what measure should be used depending on the case they would face … This work aims to promote enhanced shared situational awareness, information sharing and efficient decision-making, and should see the development of a procedure for the attribution of cyber attacks in the context of the cyber diplomacy toolbox.” Use of the “toolbox” is voluntary in nature and any collective response would require unanimous EU member support. In short, the framework represents an ambitious […]

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U.S. sends diplomats into info battles unarmed, experts say

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In the fight against Russian misinformation campaigns, U.S. diplomats are hamstrung by outdated laws and rules, and they are technologically ill-equipped for battle, a State Department advisory panel was told Tuesday. “We’re sending our [information] soldiers into battle without weapons, essentially … It’s simply unacceptable,” former senior State Department official Tom Cochran told the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, which published a report on the future of U.S. efforts abroad to combat technologically and hacking-enabled information operations like the one against the 2016 presidential election. Copies of “Can Public Diplomacy Survive the Internet? – Bots, Echo Chambers and Disinformation,” were distributed at the meeting and digitally afterwards, but the report was still unavailable on the State Department website as of early Tuesday evening. “There’s a lot that we should be able to do [with technology] … in a very white hat kind of way that we can’t … because we’re governed by a […]

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