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New York Times
18-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Under Trump, National Security Guardrails Vanish
This month, a network of pro-Russian websites began a campaign aimed at undermining confidence in the U.S. defense industry, according to disinformation analysts. The F-35 fighter jet was one target. The effort, coordinated by a Russian group known as Portal Kombat, spread rumors that American allies purchasing the warplanes would not have complete control over them, the analysts said. In the past, U.S. cybersecurity agencies would counter such campaigns by calling them out to raise public awareness. The F.B.I. would warn social media companies of inauthentic accounts so they could be removed. And, at times, U.S. Cyber Command would try to take Russian troll farms that create disinformation offline, at least temporarily. But President Trump has fired General Timothy D. Haugh, a four-star general with years of experience countering Russian online propaganda, from his posts leading U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency. The F.B.I. has shut down its foreign influence task force. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has ended its efforts to expose disinformation. And this week the State Department put employees who tracked global disinformation on leave, shutting down the effort that had publicized the spread of Chinese and Russian propaganda. Almost three months into Mr. Trump's second term, the guardrails intended to prevent national security missteps have come down as the new team races to anticipate and amplify the wishes of an unpredictable president. The result has been a diminished role for national security expertise, even in the most consequential foreign policy decisions. Trump administration officials said that is by design. In Mr. Trump's first administration, some members of his team tried to stop him from executing parts of his agenda, such as his desire to pull U.S. troops out of Syria and Afghanistan, or to deploy them against protesters in American cities. The president does not intend to allow anyone to rein him in this time. But tearing down guardrails has created room for America's adversaries to operate more freely in the disinformation space, according to Western officials and private cybersecurity experts. This is not how the American national security apparatus is supposed to work, national security experts and former officials say. The National Security Act of 1947 established the National Security Council to ensure that the president received the most expert advice on an array of global issues. The act also led to the establishment of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which advises the president on military strategy and planning. But instead of advice, Mr. Trump is getting obedience. 'Right now, the N.S.C. is at the absolute nadir of its influence in modern times,' said David Rothkopf, the author of 'Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power.' Mr. Trump is skeptical of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, so the Pentagon is considering plans to hand over U.S. command of NATO troops. The president is close to the tech billionaire Elon Musk, so the Pentagon invited him to view plans in the event of a war with China in the Pentagon 'tank,' a meeting space reserved for secure classified meetings (the White House stopped Mr. Musk from getting the China briefing). Mr. Trump fired the director of the National Security Agency and six National Security Council officials on the advice of Laura Loomer, a far-right activist. Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, appeared to have little influence over the dismissals. 'When somebody with no knowledge can come in and level accusations at the N.S.C. senior directors, and Waltz can't defend them, what does that say?' asked John R. Bolton, one of those who had Mr. Waltz's job in Mr. Trump's first term. Back then, Mr. Bolton said in an interview, Mr. Trump made clear that he disliked pushback, once saying: 'I knew I should have made Keith Kellogg the national security adviser. He never tells me his opinion unless I want it.' Mr. Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general, is now Mr. Trump's adviser to Ukraine. In February, Mr. Kellogg had cautioned against an Oval Office meeting between Mr. Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine because he was worried such plans were premature, two administration officials said. The meeting took place anyway, and blew up. Mr. Trump temporarily cut off crucial aid and intelligence sharing to Ukraine, complaining that Mr. Zelensky had not sufficiently expressed his gratitude. The rest of the national security team cheered the president. 'Amen, Mr. President,' Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote on social media, applauding Mr. Trump's stance. Mr. Zelensky 'should apologize for wasting our time for a meeting that was going to end the way it did,' Secretary of State Marco Rubio added during a CNN appearance. Despite his role, Mr. Kellogg has been eclipsed in negotiating an end to the war between Russia and Ukraine by Steve Witkoff, a real estate developer who was initially tapped to be the special envoy for the Middle East. During Mr. Trump's first term, senior members of his national security team became a sort of guardrail against the mercurial instincts of a president often disdainful of anything he sees as reflecting the national security establishment's policy preferences. His first defense secretary, Jim Mattis, talked him out of using torture as a tool for interrogating detainees. Mr. Mattis and Mr. Bolton talked him out of withdrawing from NATO. His second chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, and his second defense secretary, Mark Esper, talked him out of using active-duty troops to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters in the legs, as the president had suggested. Sean Parnell, the Pentagon press secretary, did not respond to requests for comment. Brian Hughes, the N.S.C. spokesman, said in a statement that 'members of the national security team of the first term actively attempted to undermine President Trump including General Milley calling his then-Chinese counterpart behind the president's back.' Mr. Hughes added that it was the job of Mr. Trump's team to 'carry out the elected commander in chief's agenda, not weaken it.' The Trump team's decision to use a commercial chat app to discuss plans for attacking the Houthi militia in Yemen is one example of the way the old security rules have been pushed aside, current and former officials and national security analysts said. Mr. Mattis, Mr. Esper, Mr. Bolton and Mr. Milley would have all 'insisted that the highly classified conversations that were shamefully leaked should have been conducted in the Situation Room,' said retired Adm. James Stavridis, the former Supreme Allied Commander for Europe. Instead, Mr. Hegseth was the one who shared the sequencing for when the fighter jets would launch for the attack, and Mr. Waltz set up the chat. General Milley's immediate successor as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown, was fired by Mr. Trump in February; the acting chairman of the chiefs at the time was not in the chat. The chat itself was a rare window into national security policymaking in Mr. Trump's second term. The participants included Vice President JD Vance; Mr. Rubio; the C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe; and the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. They did not discuss the follow-on effects to American forces in the region of an expanded bombing campaign against the Houthis. Mr. Vance fretted about a spike in oil prices and the risk to Saudi oil fields. Usually, someone would have at least asked whether U.S. bases need to step up security in case of retaliation. Republicans have defended the Trump administration's efforts to remove the guardrails on disinformation. This month, Representative Mark Green of Tennessee, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, praised the administration's efforts to end the role of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in countering foreign disinformation. 'We want CISA focused on protecting our infrastructure, right?' he said. 'That's what it was formed for. That's what it needs to be focused on. This disinformation campaign puts the federal government in a place of deciding what is and isn't justifiable speech and I, as a freedom-loving federalist, don't like that.' A study by analysts at Alethea, an anti-disinformation company that has tracked the F-35 campaign, indicates that pro-Russian outlets are already stepping up their propaganda efforts. 'The U.S. government at least publicly seems to be taking a more hands-off approach or prioritizing defense against other threats,' said Lisa Kaplan, Alethea's chief executive. 'So foreign governments are currently targeting government and military programs like the F-35 program — if they can't beat it on the battlefield, beat it through influencing political discourse and disinformation.' Alethea found that Russian-controlled websites began pushing narratives after China restricted the export of a wide range of critical minerals and magnets to retaliate against Mr. Trump's sharp increase in tariffs. The messages claimed that the United States faced a strategic vulnerability that could affect its ability to manufacture the F-35 and other weapons systems. The Russian postings said that America's willingness to allow manufacturing to move overseas had made its military edge unsustainable. The websites also amplified the message that U.S. allies no longer trusted that American defense companies would be reliable suppliers. It is hard to know how much traction the Russian disinformation campaign has gained. But it is tilling fertile ground. Canada, Portugal and other countries are reconsidering their commitments to buy F-35s in the face of Mr. Trump's criticism of Europe and Canada and his tariff policy. With the dismantling of the disinformation programs, Ms. Kaplan said, American companies 'are increasingly on their own.' 'From what we are seeing, foreign influence efforts may actually be increasing, especially with the rise of anti-Americanism, and it will increasingly target the private sector and different companies of geostrategic and geopolitical importance,' she added.
New York Times
05-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Trump Weakens U.S. Cyberdefenses at a Moment of Rising Danger
When President Trump abruptly fired the head of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command on Thursday, it was the latest in a series of moves that have torn away at the country's cyberdefenses just as they are confronting the most sophisticated and sustained attacks in the nation's history. The commander, General Timothy D. Haugh, had sat atop the enormous infrastructure of American cyberdefenses until his removal, apparently under pressure from the far-right Trump loyalist Laura Loomer. He had been among the American officials most deeply involved in pushing back on Russia, dating to his work countering Moscow's interference in the 2016 election. His dismissal came after weeks in which the Trump administration swept away nearly all of the government's election-related cyberdefenses beyond the secure N.S.A. command centers at Fort Meade, Md. At the same time, the administration has shrunk much of the nation's complex early-warning system for cyberattacks, a web through which tech firms work with the F.B.I. and intelligence agencies to protect the power grid, pipelines and telecommunications networks. Cybersecurity experts, election officials and lawmakers — mostly Democrats but a few Republicans — have begun to raise alarms that the United States is knocking down a system that, while still full of holes, has taken a decade to build. It has pushed out some of its most experienced cyberdefenders and fired younger talent brought in to design defenses against a wave of ransomware, Chinese intrusions and vulnerabilities created by artificial intelligence. 'At a time when the United States is facing unprecedented cyberthreats — as the Salt Typhoon cyberattack from China has so clearly underscored — how does firing him make Americans any safer?' Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on Thursday night after General Haugh's ouster. Mr. Warner was referring to an operation in which Chinese intelligence bored so deeply into American telecommunications networks that it had access to the Justice Department's system for lawful interception of calls or text messages and could listen in on some conversations, including Mr. Trump's during his campaign last year. Mr. Trump's embattled national security adviser, Michael Waltz, has not yet announced a new cyberstrategy, but he has argued that the country needs to go on offense more. 'We've been playing a lot of defense, and we keep trying to play better and better defense,' Mr. Waltz told Breitbart before the inauguration. 'If you're putting cyber time bombs in our ports and grid,' he added, the United States must show that 'we can do it to you, too.' But many cyberexperts worry that the intense focus on offensive operations — which have been part of American strategy going back to the U.S.-Israeli cyberattack on Iran's nuclear program 15 years ago — is risky. America's huge vulnerabilities, made evident in recent years as China placed malware in its rival's utility grids and the telecom system, illustrate how easy a target the United States is for retaliation. As a top cyberofficial in the Defense Department during the Biden administration used to point out, 'we live in the glassiest house.' 'Somebody lowered the drawbridge' In his first term, Mr. Trump and his top aides fortified cyberdefenses: He signed legislation creating the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and the White House started publicly naming countries that were attacking the United States. As the 2018 elections approached, U.S. Cyber Command conducted counterstrikes on Russian hackers and intelligence agencies. General Haugh was deeply involved in that effort as a leader of the 'Russia Small Group,' a joint operation between the N.S.A., the nation's premier cyberespionage agency — with 32,000 employees, it is nearly 50 percent larger than the C.I.A. — and Cyber Command, its military cousin. But Mr. Trump has moved in the opposite direction in his second term. For four years, he nurtured deep resentments about CISA, which had declared that the 2020 election was one of the best run in history, undercutting his false claims that he had been cheated of victory. Weeks after taking office this year, he began a campaign of dismantlement. Federal programs that monitored foreign influence and disinformation have been eliminated. Key elements of the warning systems intended to flag possible intrusions into voting software have also been degraded; the effects may not be known until the next major election. And contractors who worked with local election officials to perform cybersecurity testing, usually with federal funding, have found the deals canceled. In early March, CISA — which is nested inside the Department of Homeland Security — cut more than $10 million in funding to two critical cybersecurity intelligence-sharing programs that helped detect and deter cyberattacks and that alerted state and local governments about them. One program was dedicated to election security, and the other to broader government assets, including electrical grids. In some counties around the nation, these two programs were the only ways that local governments stayed on top of mounting attacks. 'It's like somebody lowered the drawbridge, and there's no guards,' said Adrian Fontes, the Democratic secretary of state in Arizona, who has written letters of protest to the White House, the Department of Homeland Security and his congressional delegation. 'This is incredibly bad.' CISA's election-security program had helped identify not only cyberattacks but also risks to key infrastructure like voter databases. The program shared information between election officials and federal agencies to prevent attacks. In Arizona, the program helped Mr. Fontes and other officials learn on election night in November that 15 bomb threats they had received were a hoax originating in Russia, a realization that allowed voting to go largely uninterrupted in the battleground state. In Colorado, the program helped Jena Griswold, the Democratic secretary of state, alert her counterparts across the country, as well as CISA, about an orchestrated break-in by a local election official in 2021. CISA's leadership has maintained that election officials will have 'access to the same CISA support,' which includes 'cyber and physical security services and incident response.' Cuts and canceled contracts Similar but less severe cuts have hit the country's broader cybersecurity defenses, at a moment when ransomware attacks are becoming more sophisticated and efforts to deter state-sponsored attacks have largely failed. The innovative Cyber Safety Review Board — based on the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates transportation accidents — was created by the Biden administration to extract critical lessons from major breaches. It was dismantled soon after Mr. Trump took office, even as it was in the midst of examining Salt Typhoon and trying to figure out how China's intelligence agencies pierced deep into the American telecommunications system. Because the first line of defense is often in the private sector — Microsoft was the first to find Salt Typhoon — the impact of this retrenchment may take months or years to understand. Jason Healey, a cyberexpert at Columbia University with long experience in government, said that the cuts 'to secure elections or fight misinformation are least likely to get reinstated.' But he predicted that new leaders of Mr. Trump's cyberdefense programs were 'likely to rebuild others once they realize, like every team before them, they need outside advisers and mechanisms to better coordinate and share information across government and with companies in critical infrastructure.' In a reflection of the administration's effort to bring cybersecurity more within the government, CISA canceled contracts in March that affected more than a hundred cybersecurity experts with a range of specialties. Some, for example, led 'Red Teams' that hunted for vulnerabilities that needed to be sealed off to intruders, a practice known as penetration testing. And there are reports of more looming cuts at the agency, though the timing remains unclear, and the agency declined to comment. Administration officials argue that the nation's cyberdefenses remain robust, and they have defended the cuts as eliminating duplicative work. 'CISA has taken action to terminate contracts where the agency has been able to find efficiencies and eliminate duplication of effort,' the agency said in a statement this month. It added, 'CISA's Red Teams continue their work without interruption.' But Mr. Waltz is betting that by going on offense, he can deter attacks on the United States. Yet history suggests that the strategies that worked in the nuclear arena often do not translate smoothly to cyber operations. Over the past 15 years American cyberwarriors have not only crippled Iran's nuclear program but also gotten inside Russian power plants and North Korea's missile program. But the effects have proved fleeting. Russian, Iranian and North Korean cyberattacks on the United States have grown more sophisticated, and so has North Korea's missile arsenal. Fears about future voting security Around the country, election officials in both parties are worried. Al Schmidt, the Republican secretary of state in Pennsylvania, sent a letter last month to Kristi Noem, who as the homeland security secretary oversees CISA, listing four instances last year when federal cybersecurity programs currently being targeted helped his state hold fair elections. In August, for example, CISA helped ward off an attempted cyberattack on Pennsylvania voters using text messages disguised as reminders to register to vote. And in September, CISA warned that envelopes containing white powder were being sent to Pennsylvania election offices. 'Put simply, withdrawing CISA's support for local election officials will make elections less secure,' Mr. Schmidt wrote. His letter brought up another point: Many election officials can no longer seek outside funding to pay for the cybersecurity programs that the federal government is now cutting. Pennsylvania and 27 other states have passed laws banning private donations to help fund elections infrastructure. The measures, known as Zuckerbucks bans, stem from conservative groups' false claims that the billionaire Mark Zuckerberg helped Democrats steal the 2020 election with his large donations to election offices. In Weber County, Utah, a heavily conservative area, Ricky Hatch, the county clerk, said that, while he was a Republican himself, he worried about the end of federal help. 'I understand and applaud the efforts of the current administration, however clumsy they might be, to take a hard look at places where they can save money,' said Mr. Hatch, who helped start CISA's election-security program. But the funding for election security, he added, 'is crucial money that is well spent to help secure the infrastructure of our nation's election systems.' 'I'm pretty concerned that that money is going to move away from that sphere,' he said. Ms. Griswold, the Colorado secretary of state, noted that before long, America would find itself in election season again. 'The bigger picture is that the loss of partners at the federal level could have this huge impact, and we do not have the pleasure of waiting around for the Trump administration to figure out what they're doing,' she said. 'Elections start very soon.'
