OPINION:
The historian Ariel Durant observed, “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”
Rome succumbed first to its internal vices; the Soviet Union collapsed because of endemic corruption. With our discordant elections perhaps representative of decline, numerous observers believe America is next.
Our country must innovate or face regression. Cybersecurity is critical, for without it our elections are subject to damage and manipulation; our financial and personal data, to compromise and misappropriation; and our infrastructure, including our energy grid, to attack.
Each of us spends much of our waking hours in a virtual world. The greatest geniuses of 200 years ago, if teleported to our present time, would not be astounded that we possess cars, planes or helicopters, for such inventions were depicted in Leonardo’s codices created more than 500 years ago. What would amaze such intellects is that we spend so much of our time in a synthetic world, which is a representation of reality that may be altered by adding or subtracting ones and zeros.
Cyberwarfare creates injurious differences between this representation of reality and reality itself; these differences are hidden from users, in order to change behaviors and actions. Cyberwarfare thus corrupts truth, preempting informed action. America must realize that a threat of this magnitude requires a Herculean response: a Manhattan Project for our time, in this domain.
In 2018, President Trump signed into law the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act, which established the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which is part of the Department of Homeland Security. Concerning the 2020 elections, CISA stated, “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” The director of the agency was subsequently fired.
One need not take a stand on the legitimacy of CISA’s statement to reach the conclusion that CISA is the wrong agency in the wrong place. CISA as presently constituted lacks the technical expertise, the position, and the authority to carry out its mandate. Replacing CISA must constitute a priority for the next administration.
The Manhattan Project created the weapons that ended WWII. The need to enforce cybersecurity to protect America should employ the management principles assembled from that work of unprecedented complexity.
First, the successor organization to CISA must not be part of any agency. It must be led by a bipartisan steering committee that will report directly to the president. To be nimble, this organization must be small, with a staff of 200 or less.
Second, a dual-management structure for cybersecurity is necessary. Gen. Leslie Groves oversaw the entire Manhattan Project; physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was the first director of the technical core of the program, the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Therefore, a new national laboratory for cybersecurity should be created under the aegis of the steering committee.
The lab’s director must be a nationally recognized leader in cybersecurity. The laboratory should employ civil servants as well as experts seconded from the military, academia and the private sector; additional staff would be deployed throughout the nation to be proximate to critical nodes or existing cybersecurity centers.
Third, as was accomplished with celerity in WWII, the new organization must enshrine international outreach. In doing so, it must be mindful that America’s atomic secrets were compromised by Klaus Fuchs, who spied for Stalin, and by Hsue-Shen Tsien, who became the architect of China’s atomic bomb and ballistic missile programs. Thus, security must be peerless, with professionals cleared at the highest levels and polygraphs common.
Fourth, the steering committee must be given broad authorities by law. Its laboratory must have acquisition abilities analogous to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It should employ priorities to speed its work in a manner similar to Silverplate, which was the codename that enabled the rapid production of special planes, which served to end WWII.
Fifth, the organization must have a public interface to allow the rapid circulation of threat information and countermeasures. It should form distinct panels and connections with cybersecurity, social media, and IT companies.
Sixth, the organization must make election and voting security a principal objective. If our elections are perceived as being insecure by a substantial fraction of the electorate, our constitutional republic is in peril. Political convictions must not be allowed to serve as arbiters of truth, for they are mercurial and often blinding.
It is through a frightening lens we see how history turns on itself. Charles-Henri Sanson, the royal executioner of France during the reign of King Louis XVI, became the High Executioner of the First Republic. He executed the king whom he had served, though as an apprentice to his uncle, Sanson assisted in the ghastly execution of King Louis XV’s would-be assassin. Political horrors know no side or party. This realization occurred, no doubt, to Robespierre when he was led to the guillotine, for Sanson, his executioner, served Robespierre during France’s Reign of Terror.
It is fundamental that cybersecurity management be both trustworthy and apolitical if it is to support election security. We are in a time infused with madness and despair, whose entrenchment can only be stopped by nonpartisan thought, temperance and leadership. A constitutional republic is rare; one-party despotisms are common. We must not trade a diamond for a fist full of sand. We must preserve a reverent integrity in our system of elections and institutions. Cybersecurity is essential to these and many other objectives.
• John Poindexter is a physicist and a former assistant to the president for national security affairs. Robert McFarlane is chairman of an international energy company and a former assistant to the president for national security affairs. Richard Levine is a former deputy assistant Secretary of the Navy and a former NSC staff director. They are the authors of “America’s #1 Adversary And What We Must Do About It ─ Now!”
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