HUNT VALLEY, Md. (TNND) — Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said Thursday that her office has taken “meaningful steps” to protect the intelligence community from cyber threats.
Gabbard’s team has made the greatest effort ever to invest in the community’s technology and modernize its systems, she claimed in a statement.
“President Trump’s Intelligence Community is moving faster and more decisively on cybersecurity modernization and investments in IT than ever before, delivering stronger defenses, greater efficiency, and real cost savings for the American people,” Gabbard said.
Some lawmakers have expressed concern over her operations. Senator Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat, said last year that Gabbard had risked the country’s ability to address threats by politicizing the intelligence community. Firings, revoked clearances and retaliatory reassignments of officials have quieted many into submitting to the Trump administration, according to the lawmaker.
“As this administration fires and denigrates these very men and women, as expertise that takes literally decades to build is being thrown away because it conflicts with political talking points, as assessments grounded in fact are being shelved in favor of conspiracy theories, our adversaries are conspiring, sharing intelligence and military capabilities and strategizing over how to weaken the United States while advancing a very different authoritarian vision for the world,” Warner argued in a September speech.
Gabbard said on Thursday that American intelligence officials have more access to resources than before her office began investing in the community’s systems last March. The director partnered with the Defense Department to share data centers, modernized the facilities and improved networks, she explained.
“Protecting our nation’s most sensitive information from those who seek to exploit it, while making sure our intelligence professionals have the tools and access they need to do their jobs, is not optional,” Gabbard said. “It is essential to our national security.”
The modernization of federal information systems is part of President Donald Trump’s cyber agenda. He said in his announcement of the policies earlier this month that the country’s cyber tools and officials are the best in the world.
“The United States has capabilities that the rest of the world can only begin to imagine,” Trump asserted. “Our warriors in cyberspace are working everyday to ensure that anyone who would seek to harm America will pay the steepest and most terrible price.”
The administration has carried out cyberattacks in military operations against other countries. In January, the Pentagon shut off power in Venezuela’s capital while arresting its president, Nicolás Maduro.
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