Witnesses call for revamped approach to counterintelligence amid cyber threats, at House hearing

“Today, we ask whether our government architecture is appropriate to respond to this new environment, and how we can, and must, keep pace. We must openly consider where we are succeeding and where we need to change our approach,” House Intelligence Chairman Rick Crawford (R-AR) said in his opening remarks at the Sept. 2 hearing .

The hearing followed the Aug. 31 release of the committee’s report on implementation of recommendations in the landmark 9/11 Commission report, 25 years after the terrorist attacks. Witnesses included McCrary Institute director Frank Cilluffo, Hudson Institute senior fellow David Feith and Seth Jones, president of the defense and security department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Crawford highlighted threat actors affiliated with China and Russia operating “persistent whole-of-society campaigns inside the homeland, penetrating networks, compromising supply chains, cultivating insiders and running influence operations across illegal and unclear areas referred to as the gray zone,” in his opening statement. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) said the hearing was intended to “advance the goal of an aggressive but measured approach of improving what exists, whether by hardening our cyber defenses, ensuring information collected by law enforcement doesn't stay mired in a case file, or conducting CI campaigns.” In his prepared remarks , Cilluffo argued that lawmakers should consider the possibility of establishing a government entity focused on counterintelligence operations, using the “mission-centered model” of the Central Intelligence Agency.

“Building on the CIA’s mission-center model, an enterprise-wide counterintelligence approach could organize existing capabilities around priority adversary campaigns without transferring statutory authorities or creating another agency,” Cilluffo said. While the FBI and the Intelligence Community’s “missions and people are essential,” Cilluffo argued, “The architecture has not kept pace with the target set or threat.” “America’s openness is one of our greatest strategic advantages -- not a liability to engineer out of our system. The goal is not to put walls around American innovation, but to prevent our openness from becoming an adversary’s operating model,” he said.

“The threat has changed, our counterintelligence model must change with it.” CSIS’ Jones argued that the widespread deployment of commercially available AI technologies has “increased the threat from disinformation campaigns and cyber offensive cyber operations in the in the U.S. homeland.” Jones said in his opening remarks, “My general view is we do not have an effective national counterintelligence agency that looks across different functions, not just the DOJ and FBI side of it ... but much bigger than that, looking at property, cyber operations and protecting bases.” Jones also called for an approach to counterintelligence that “brings together people from across government agencies, including state and local [government].” In his opening statement, Feith of the Hudson Institute also argued that the “United States needs a new counterintelligence approach to the AI age.” “Today, an extraordinary share of strategically important technology lives in private-owned infrastructure, frontier data labs, venture-backed quantum, fusion companies, semiconductor fax, cloud platforms, data centers, drone manufacturers,” Feith said. Feith continued, “China's intelligence, military targeting, and technology acquisition apparatus has every reason to follow American innovation into those places. Our own national security institutions must keep up.” Rep.

Trent Kelly (R-MS) asked the witnesses, “What is the biggest mismatch between the way China competes and the way our national security enterprise is organized to respond?” Cilluffo answered, “I call for a mission center that is CI-focused.” He elaborated that his proposal for the mission center would involve stakeholders from across the federal government, adding, “Everyone has to be part of that approach because that is where many of the instruments lie for good and bad, and that is what is being targeted.” “Secondly, we need to bring back an executive in the White House at the [National Security Council],” Cilluffo said, adding, “We need an individual who is responsible for this.” Krishnamoorthi raised concerns over workforce reductions to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during his questions to the panel, highlighting coordinated cyber attacks against water utilities and an Aug. 26 Justice Department announcement on Chinese-affiliated threat actors targeting government entities including the Federal Reserve, DOJ, NASA, the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Senate.

Krishnamoorthi said, “One-thousand employees were actually let go at CISA, and so I respectfully submit: if we are going to take this threat seriously, with regard to our infrastructure and our cyber infrastructure, we cannot downsize CISA.