NSA director Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden announces a major reorganization at the upper reaches of his agency. The changes, he says, are designed to enable top managers to focus on reengineering signals intelligence in the face of rapidly changing communications technology, particularly the move from radio wave intercepts to digital intercept and exploitation.
Speaking at a computer security conference in Baltimore, Hayden says that cyberspace had become as important a potential battlefield as any other. He said that digital cyberspace—not just Internet-connected computers and systems but also computer networks—held out as much prospect for offense as well as defense. “It is a place where we must ensure American security as surely as land, sea, air and space,” Hayden said.
Twenty years later, the statement seems both prescient and archaic in that it could be as much said today, with the U.S. government still struggling to establish the capabilities and the rules of the road for intelligence collection and action in cyberspace. But then the reality was that the “retooling” was driven as much by old sources of intercepts drying up, or at least becoming less of a priority than data transiting digital networks.