During an interview late last month, Admiral James G. Stavridis (USN), NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe stated that "NATO is working to have the right balance between ensuring intelligence gets to those who need it most and the need to protect that information, the alliance's supreme allied commander for Europe said."
According to Adm. Stavridis, the tough part is balancing "share to win" and "need to know."
"'Life is not an on or off switch. In other words, we can't just open everything up or shut everything down – although that is the tendency in moments of crisis. As a result of WikiLeaks, we will move that dial back a bit, more to the "protect" side, but I think it is very important that we don't overreact to it and simply shut down into international enclaves and cut off sharing. It would be massively counterproductive.'"
***
"'We've got to use all the technical means at our disposal to protect ourselves from something like WikiLeaks or any other attempt to intrude, manipulate, move data or reveal classified secrets. There's a policy side to it, which is deciding where the dial goes, and there's a technical side to it, and we're . . . working very hard to put those in place.'"
In response to questions regarding the interplay between cyberattacks and Article 5 of the NATO Charter (which states that an attack on any alliance member is an attack on all alliance members), Adm. Stavridis indicated that an organized NATO response would depend on the severity of the attack.
"'When you come into my networks and are manipulating my air traffic control data, and you are causing airplanes to be unable to land and they crash and people die, that's an attack.'"
The full article from American Forces Press Service can be found here.
Leave a Reply