Pentagon and intelligence community chiefs have urged Obama to remove the head of the NSA
- The Washington Post
The heads of the Pentagon and the nation’s intelligence community have recommended to President Obama that the director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, be removed.
The recommendation, delivered to the White House last month, was made by Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., according to several U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
Action has been delayed, some administration officials said, because relieving Rogers of his duties is tied to another controversial recommendation: to create separate chains of command at the NSA and the military’s cyberwarfare unit, a recommendation by Clapper and Carter that has been stalled because of other issues.
The news comes as Rogers is being considered by President-elect Donald Trump to be his nominee for director of national intelligence to replace Clapper as the official who oversees all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies. In a move apparently unprecedented for a military officer, Rogers, without notifying superiors, traveled to New York to meet with Trump on Thursday at Trump Tower. That caused consternation at senior levels of the administration, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal personnel matters.
The White House, Pentagon and Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment. The NSA did not respond to requests for comment. Carter has concerns with Rogers’s performance, officials said. The driving force for Clapper, meanwhile, was the separation of leadership roles at the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, and his stance that the NSA should be headed by a civilian.
In a speech before the National Press Club on July 16, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, director of the National Security Agency, said that the agency is increasingly involved in responding to cyberthreats. (C-SPAN)
In a speech before the National Press Club on July 16, the director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael S. Rogers said that the agency is increasingly involved in responding to cyber threats. In a speech on July 16, National Security Agency, Adm. Michael S. Rogers said the agency is increasingly involved in responding to cyber threats. (C-SPAN)
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, on Saturday sent Clapper and Carter a letter defending Rogers. “I have been consistently impressed with his leadership and accomplishments,” said Nunes, who is also a member of Trump’s transition team. “His professionalism, expertise and deckplate leadership have been remarkable during an extremely challenging period for NSA. I know other members of Congress hold him in similarly high esteem.”
Nunes said he will call a hearing on the matter.
Rogers, 57, took the helm of the NSA and Cyber Command in April 2014 in the wake of revelations by a former intelligence contractor of broad surveillance activities that shook public confidence in the agency. The contractor, Edward Snowden, had secretly downloaded vast amounts of digital documents that he shared with a handful of journalists. His disclosures prompted debate over the proper scale of surveillance and led to some reforms.
But they also were a black eye for an agency that prides itself on having the most skilled hackers and cybersecurity professionals in government. Rogers was charged with making sure another insider breach never happened again.
Instead, in the past year and a half, officials have discovered two major compromises of sensitive hacking tools by personnel working at the NSA’s premier hacking unit: the Tailored Access Operations. One involved a Booz Allen Hamilton contractor, Harold T. Martin III, who is accused of carrying out the largest theft of classified government material. Although some of his activity took place before Rogers arrived and at other agencies, some of it — including the breach of some of the most sensitive tools — continued on Rogers’s watch, the officials said.
Martin’s alleged theft was discovered when some of the tools he is accused of stealing were mysteriously released online in August. They included computer code based on obscure software flaws that could be used to take control of firewalls and networks — what one former TAO operator called “the keys to the kingdom.”
A federal contractor suspected in the leak of powerful National Security Agency hacking tools has been arrested and charged with stealing classified information from the U.S. government, according to court records and U.S. officials familiar with the case. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)
A federal contractor suspected in the leak of powerful National Security Agency hacking tools has been arrested and charged with stealing classified information from the U.S. government, according to court records and U.S. officials familiar with the case. But he's not Edward Snowden. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)
Martin, who moved from the NSA to a job in a Defense Department acquisitions agency last year, was arrested in August. The news broke last month.
[Government alleges NSA contractor stole ‘astonishing quantity’ of classified material]
But there was a second, previously undisclosed breach of cybertools, discovered in the summer of 2015, which was also carried out by a TAO employee, one official said. That individual also has been arrested, but his case has not been made public. The individual is not believed to have shared the material with another country, the official said.
Rogers was put on notice by his two bosses — Clapper and Carter — that he had to get control of internal security and improve his leadership style. There have been persistent complaints from NSA personnel that Rogers is aloof, frequently absent and does not listen to staff input. The NSA is an intelligence agency but part of the Defense Department, hence the two overseers.
FBI agents investigating the Martin breach were appalled at how lax security was at the TAO, officials said. “[Rogers] is a guy who has been at the helm of the NSA at the time of some of the most egregious security breaches, most recently Hal Martin,” a senior administration official said. “Clearly it’s a sprawling bureaucracy . . . but I think there’s a compelling case that can be made that some of the safeguards that should have been put in place were either not fully put in place or not implemented properly.”
At the same time, Rogers has not impressed Carter with his handling of U.S. Cyber Command’s cyberoffensive against the Islamic State. Over the past year or so, the command’s operations against the terrorist group’s networks in Syria and Iraq have not borne much fruit, officials said. In the past month, military hackers have been successful at disrupting some Islamic State networks, but it was the first time they had done that, the officials said.
The expectation had been that Rogers would be replaced before the Nov. 8 election, but as part of an announcement about the change in leadership structure at the NSA and Cyber Command, a second administration official said.
“It was going to be part of a full package,” the official said. “The idea was not for any kind of public firing.” In any case, Rogers’s term at the NSA and Cyber Command is due to end in the spring, officials said.
The president would then appoint an acting NSA director, enabling his successor to nominate their own person. But a key lawmaker, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, threatened to block any such nominee if the White House proceeded with the plan to split the leadership at the NSA and Cyber Command.
The rationale for splitting what is called the “dual-hat” arrangement is that the agencies’ missions are fundamentally different, that the nation’s cyberspies and military hackers should not be competing to use the same networks, and that the job of leading both organizations is too big for one person.
But McCain is concerned that placing Cyber Command under its own leadership will hinder its effectiveness, as it is highly dependent on the NSA for capabilities.
Meanwhile, in February, Rogers announced a major reorganization, which he called NSA21, at the NSA to better adapt to the digital age. He has merged the agency’s spying and hacking arms with its computer-security division into one Directorate of Operations. That reorganization has only intensified the discontent that has marked Rogers’s tenure at the agency, current and former officials said.
“The morale is horrible,” one former senior official said. Especially during a period of change, a leader needs to be present, the official said. “Any leader knows that when you institute change, you have to be there. You have to help heal the wounds, be very active. He was not.”
But Saxby Chambliss, a former Republican senator from Georgia who served on the Select Committee on Intelligence, said that he thinks highly of Rogers. “When it comes to the world of cyber, there’s nobody more capable than Mike Rogers in the military world today,” he said.
Nonetheless, Rogers has seen other embarrassing network breaches on his watch. In 2013, Iranian hackers managed to penetrate the Navy’s unclassified network when Rogers was head of the 10th Fleet/Navy Cyber Command, the unit responsible for protecting the Navy’s networks. It took months to expel the attackers.
Rogers is a Navy cryptologist whose military career spans 35 years. He began his career as a surface-warfare officer in 1981. A Chicago native, he also has served as head of the Chairman’s Action Group, an in-house Pentagon think tank to advise on policy and long-term issues, under then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Peter Pace, and as director of intelligence at Pacific Command and then on the Joint Staff.
Yet another Islamic Extremist Terrorist attack on U.S. soil during the Obama tenure.
Good job on the vetting there Obama. How many more of your Muslim Brother Terrorists have you just let into our country?
'Stop interfering': OSU attacker slammed US over treatment of Muslims on Facebook
The man who plowed a car into a crowd at Ohio State University before stabbing several pedestrians with a butcher knife praised American-born Al Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki as a “hero” and also rallied against U.S. interference in Muslim lands, law enforcement officials said.
"America! Stop interfering with other countries, especially the Muslim Ummah. We are not weak. We are not weak, remember that," Abdul Razak Ali Artan reportedly wrote on Facebook, using the Arabic term for the world's Muslim community.
The posts from Artan's account came to light after Monday's violence, which left 11 people injured.
"Every single Muslim who disapproves of my actions is a sleeper cell, waiting for a signal. I am warning you Oh America!" Artan also said.
The posts were recounted by a law enforcement official who was briefed on the investigation but wasn't authorized to discuss it publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Other sources told Fox News on Tuesday that the reference of al-Awlaki on Abdul Razak Ali Artan’s social media accounts is “deeply concerning” because it could suggest he was self-radicalized before launching the attack.
The FBI is now in possession of Artan’s electronic devices and will focus their investigation on whether he was reading the two recent ISIS propaganda journals that called for attacks using vehicles and knives, a law enforcement source added.
In recent months, federal law enforcement officials have raised concerns about online extremist propaganda that encourages knife and car attacks, which are easier to pull off than bombings.
The Islamic State group has urged sympathizers online to carry out lone-wolf attacks in their home countries with whatever weapons are available to them.
On Tuesday, the group said on its news agency, AMAQ, that Artan "is a soldier" of Islamic State, Reuters reported.
"Brother Abdul Razak Ali Artan, God accept him, implementer of the Ohio attack, a student in his third year in university," the post read.
Al-Awlaki, who was a senior Al Qaeda leader, was killed more than five years ago during a CIA-led U.S. drone strike. Before his death, al-Awlaki was involved in several terror plots in the United States, using his fluent English skills to draw recruits to carry out attacks.
FIVE YEARS AFTER THIS DEATH, ANWAR AL-AWLAKI'S TOXIC MESSAGE IS ALIVE AND WELL
According to law enforcement sources, Artan was born in Somalia and was a legal U.S. permanent resident.
Sources told Fox News that Artan attended Columbus State Community College and graduated with an associate’s degree earlier this year. Allen Kraus, the school’s vice president of marketing and communications, said the former student had no record of behavioral or disciplinary issues during his time at CSCC.
Ohio State's student newspaper, The Lantern, ran an interview in August with a student named Abdul Razak Artan, who identified himself as a Muslim and a third-year logistics management student who had just transferred from Columbus State in the fall.
He said he was looking for a place to pray openly and worried about how he would be received.
"I was kind of scared with everything going on in the media. I'm a Muslim, it's not what media portrays me to be," he told the newspaper. "If people look at me, a Muslim praying, I don't know what they're going to think, what's going to happen. But I don't blame them. It's the media that put that picture in their heads."
Rep. Adam Schiff, of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said the act bore the hallmarks of an attack carried out by someone who may have been self-radicalized.
Officer Alan Horujko, 28, who stopped Artan from hurting more people, is being hailed a hero. Ohio State University Police Chief Craig Stone said Horujko, who joined the force in January 2015, was near where Artan attacked because of a gas leak and arrived on the scene and shot the knife-wielding Artan in less than a minute.
Surveillance photos showed Artan in the car by himself just before the attack, but investigators are looking into whether anyone else was involved, the campus police chief said.
Eleven victims were taken to three Columbus hospitals. Most had been hurt by the car, and two had been stabbed, officials said. One had a fractured skull.
Classes at OSU were canceled after the attack, but were scheduled to resume Tuesday.
Students said they were nervous about returning and planned to take precautions such as not walking alone.
"It's kind of nerve-wracking going back to class right after it," said Kaitlin Conner, 18, of Cleveland, who said she had a midterm exam to take Tuesday.
Leaders of Muslim organizations and mosques in the Columbus area condemned the attacks while cautioning people against jumping to conclusions or blaming a religion or an ethnicity.
LOL, your so funny 
Mule man your so sad it's almost pathetic.
Oh and it gets even better. The now disgraced Tim Kaine must be off his Hillary meds:
Tim Kaine initially blames ‘gun violence’ for Ohio State car-and-knife attack
The Washington Times http://www.washingtontimes.com
Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine said Monday he was saddened by the “senseless act of gun violence” at Ohio State University, even though the attacker used a butcher knife and a car.
Mr. Kaine, who ran on the 2016 Democratic ticket with presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, was accused of pushing a gun-control agenda after his Twitter post blaming firearms for the siege.
Eleven people were injured in a rampage by Somali-born student Abdul Razak Ali Artan, who drove into a crowd on a sidewalk and then chased bystanders with a knife in what is being investigated as a possible act of terrorism.
He was shot and killed by Ohio State Police Officer Alan Horujko.
Mr. Kaine was blasted by those who charged him with trying to politicize the tragedy.
“The only guns used were by the police. Try and confirm before you politicize,” Rick Moore said on Twitter.
Mr. Kaine later corrected himself, saying in a tweet, “Updated reports say attacker used a vehicle & knife. Horrifying & senseless.”
The campus went on lockdown Monday morning after an initial university alert warned of an “active shooter.”
Someone obviously has a huge man crush on Obama. Wow. Talk about obsession.
Someone obviously has a huge man crush on Obama. Wow. Talk about obsession.
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Yes, you do seem to have that issue.
Does Obama still demand you use the lube?
More fake news, from the king of imbeciles. 😛
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You should really pull your nose out of that cow's butt.
Huffing cow farts has been known to be mind altering.
