Full piece at: <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/world/shoulders/tenet020701.htm>
DRAFT OUTLINE: DCI’s Worldwide Threat Briefing
Statement by Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on the Worldwide Threat 2001: National Security in a Changing World (as prepared for delivery) 7 February 2001
INFORMATION OPERATIONS AND SPACE
Mr. Chairman, I want to reemphasize the concerns I raised last year about our nation’s vulnerability to attacks on our critical information infrastructure. No country in the world rivals the US in its reliance, dependence, and dominance of information systems. The great advantage we derive from this also presents us with unique vulnerabilities.
Indeed, computer-based information operations could provide our adversaries with an asymmetric response to US military superiority by giving them the potential to degrade or circumvent our advantage in conventional military power. Attacks on our military, economic, or telecommunications infrastructure can be launched from anywhere in the world, and they can be used to transport the problems of a distant conflict directly to America’s heartland. Likewise, our adversaries well understand US strategic dependence on access to space. Operations to disrupt, degrade, or defeat US space assets will be attractive options for those seeking to counter US strategic military superiority. Moreover, we know that foreign countries are interested in or experimenting with a variety of technologies that could be used to develop counterspace capabilities. Mr. Chairman, we are in a race with technology itself. We are creating relations with the private sector and academia to help us keep pace with ever-changing technology. Last year I established the Information Operations Center within CIA to bring together our best and brightest to ensure that we had a strategy for dealing with the cyber threat.
Along with partners in the Departments of Justice, Energy, and Defense we will work diligently to protect critical US information assets. Let me also say that we must view our space systems and capabilities as part of the same critical infrastructure that needs protection...
...We must aggressively challenge our analytic assumptions, avoid old-think, and embrace alternate analysis and viewpoints. We must constantly push the envelope on collection beyond the traditional to exploit new systems and operational opportunities to gain the intelligence needed by our senior policymakers. And we must continue to stay ahead on the technology and information fronts by seeking new partnerships with private industry as demonstrated by our IN-Q-TEL initiative. Our goal is simple. It is to ensure that our nation has the intelligence it needs to anticipate and counter threats I have discussed here today.
Thank you Mr. Chairman, I would welcome any questions you and your fellow Senators may have for me. *************** "But consider the definition of a racketeer as someone who creates a threat and then charges for its reduction. Governments provision of this protection, by this standard, often qualifies as racketeering. To the extent that the threats against which a government protects its citizens are imaginary or are consequences of its own activities, the government has organized a protection racket. Since governments themselves commonly simulate, stimulate or even fabricate threats of external war and since the repressive and extractive activities of government often constitute the largest current threats to the livelihoods of their own citizens, many governments operate in essentially the same ways as racketeers." [C. Tilly "War Making and State Making as Organized Crime"--from Bringing the State Back In edited by Peter Evans Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol, Cambridge University Press]