Intelligence Agencies are not here to Defend Your Enterprise

If there is a potentially dangerous side-effect to the discovery of a set of 0-days allegedly belonging to the NSA it is the dissemination of the idea, and credulous belief of same, that intelligence agencies should place the security of the Internet – and commercial concerns that use it - above their actual missions. It displays an all-too familiar ignorance of why intelligence agencies exist and how they operate. Before you get back to rending your hair and gnashing your teeth, let's keep a few things in mind.

1. Intelligence agencies exist to gather information, analyze it, and deliver their findings to policymakers so that they can make decisions about how to deal with threats to the nation. Period. You can, and agencies often do, dress this up and expand on it in order to motivate the workforce, or more likely grab more money and authority, but when it comes down to it, stealing and making sense of other people’s information is the job. Doing code reviews and QA for Cisco is not the mission.
2. The one element in the intelligence community that was charged with supporting defense is no more. I didn’t like it then, and it seems pretty damn foolish now, but there you are, all in the name of “agility.” NSA’s IAD had the potential to do the things that all the security and privacy pundits imagine should be done for the private sector, but their job was still keeping Uncle Sam secure, not Wal-Mart.
3. The VEP is an exercise in optics. “Of course we’ll cooperate with your vulnerability release program,” says every inter-agency representative. “As long as it doesn’t interfere with our mission,” they whisper up their sleeve. Remember in every spy movie you ever saw, how the spooks briefed Congress on all the things, but not really? That.
4. 0-days are only 0-days as far as you know. What one can make another can undo – and so can someone else. The idea that someone, somewhere, working for someone else’s intelligence agency might not also be doing vulnerability research, uncovering exploitable conditions in popular networking products, and using same in the furtherance of their national security goals is a special kind of hubris.
5. Cyber security simply is not the issue we think it is. That we do any of this cyber stuff is only (largely) to support more traditional instruments and exercises of national power. Cyber doesn’t kill. Airstrikes kill. Snipers kill. Mortars kill. Policymakers are still far and away concerned with things that go ‘boom’ not bytes.In case you haven’t been paying attention for the past 15 years, we’ve had actual, shooting wars to deal with, not cyber war. 

I have spent most of my career being a defender (in and out of several different intelligence agencies). I understand the frustration, but blaming intelligence agencies for doing their job is not helpful. If you like living in the land of the free its important to note that rules that would preclude the NSA from doing what it does merely handicaps us; no one we consider a threat is going to stop looking for and exploiting holes. The SVR or MSS do not care about your amicus brief. The Internet is an important part of our world, and we should all be concerned about its operational well-being, but the way to reduce the chance that someone can crack your computer code is to write better code, and test it faster than the spooks can.