President Biden is not planning to launch any new surveillance initiatives overseeing American companies in response to a series of cybersecurity disasters “at this time.”
“We’re not looking at additional authorities for any government agencies to do additional monitoring in the U.S. at this time,” a senior administration official told reporters Friday.
Major cyberattacks against private American companies have underscored the vulnerability of government and networks that depend on popular programs. Biden’s team, wary of a fight over civil liberty and privacy, is developing measures to harden such systems without adding large-scale surveillance capabilities to the powers of the federal government.
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“We are focused on tightening the partnership between the U.S. government and the private sector, who does have visibility into the domestic industry and into private sector networks, to ensure we can rapidly share threat information,” the official said. “And we can address the liability barriers that disincentivize U.S. companies from both addressing some of these issues and rapidly sharing information when there are.”
China is believed to be responsible for a recently revealed hack of Microsoft Exchange email services. The revelation of the breach just months after the hack of an information technology software company SolarWinds, linked to Russia and discovered in December, that staggered national security officials in the United States and Europe.
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Biden’s team plans to do more of its cybersecurity work at the unclassified level so that secrecy laws won’t be a needless impediment to communication about new and emerging threats. “Cybersecurity really needs to be done unclassified,” the official said. “If we need to have a classified discussion, which we expect we regularly will, we have mechanisms where the private sector participants can [use secure facilities that are] geographically convenient for them.”
