How the U.S. Government Hacks the World
"We know foreign countries and companies swipe our corporate secrets. Now our enemies are also seeking the ability to sabotage our power grid, our financial institutions and our air traffic control systems," President Obama, in his State of the Union Address in February. (MacLeod, 2013) At the same time, President Obama signed an executive order to protect our country’s infrastructure from cyberattacks, a very real and dangerous problem. Our own government admits to cyber espionage and while former CIA and NSA agents confirm this, we, as citizens, must wonder how far our government takes this liberty while pointing their fingers at other countries, namely China.
While the article gives specific information to secretive government branches and even a secretive unit known as Tailored Access Operations, it cites a Pentagon official as well as two former U.S. government officials, all who asked not to be named. Informing the readers of possible secretive organizations within our own country and how they conduct business was achieved quite well. The facts in the article can be argued, however, considering their sources are unnamed and none of the information in the report can be unequivocally confirmed from the government.
The article does consider alternative views, namely the U.S. government. The argument is stated early in the article,
“The U.S. position is that some kinds of hacking are more acceptable than others –and the kind the NSA does is in keeping with unofficial, unspoken rules going back to the Cold War about what secrets are OK for one country to steal from another” (Riley, 2013, pp. 2-3)
Chief Executive Officer Leonard Moodispaw, of KEYW, a security company who trains hackers for U.S. intelligence, cannot discuss much of his company’s operations. His claim that “our federal partners don’t like it if