Special to WorldTribune.com

Bill Gertz, Inside the Ring, Washington Times

The White House national security adviser for counterterrorism announced this week that the Obama administration is setting up a cyberintelligence center aimed at providing better information and coordinated responses after cyberattacks that she said are growing more diverse and dangerous.

However, Lisa Monaco, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, failed to mention in a speech Tuesday that the United States already has a premier cyberthreat intelligence center: The National Security Agency, the supersecret electronic spying and code-breaking service that for years has been conducting cyberspying and cyberattacks. …

The NSA, known for tightly controlling its electronic spying takes, for several decades has been in charge of gathering and analyzing intelligence on cyberthreats. The agency has scored impressive successes over the years in the cyberspying realm as well as in conducting clandestine cyberoperations in support of U.S. national policy. The Stuxnet virus used to disrupt Iran’s illegal uranium centrifuge program was among them.

Under the Obama administration, the NSA has been forced to play a reduced role in cyberintelligence and cyberwarfare, given President Obama’s bias against giving military and defense agencies dominant roles in U.S. security. Instead, the administration appointed the less-capable Department of Homeland Security to take a leading role in cyberdefense. The new DNI cyberintelligence center also is expected to be less capable than the NSA’s cyberwizards. The NSA’s prowess in the cyber realm is unsurpassed in the world, as revealed in recently disclosed NSA documents stolen by former contractor Edward Snowden.

One NSA document published by Germany’s Der Spiegel last month revealed that the NSA is so good at cyberspying that it is able to break into foreign intelligence services’ communications links and steal their data collected from spies and electronic eavesdropping — without, at least until recently, the targets even knowing about it.

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