As far as I can tell the NSA is officially limited to signals monitoring and cyberdefense
Nope. Stuxnet came from the NSA. People within the NSA have said that a lot of what the NSA does isn't even remotely related to defence, it is actively sabotaging other countries. The reason it is happening is because everything is a grey area at the moment. "Everyone is doing what they think they can get away with".
Edit: Regarding the CIA, I highly doubt that all offensive operations would stop. It isn't practical to keep going to cyber command with stuff all the time, and these agencies by nature are fairly autonomous due to the way they try and retain information.
>As far as I can tell the NSA is officially limited to signals monitoring and cyberdefense
Nope. Stuxnet came from the NSA. People within the NSA have said that a lot of what the NSA does isn't even remotely related to defence, it is actively sabotaging other countries. The reason it is happening is because _everything_ is a grey area at the moment. "Everyone is doing what they think they can get away with".
Edit: Regarding the CIA, I highly doubt that all offensive operations would stop. It isn't practical to keep going to cyber command with stuff all the time, and these agencies by nature are fairly autonomous due to the way they try and retain information.
Oh I know they're talking about NSA in the article.
As far as I can tell the NSA is officially limited to signals monitoring and cyberdefense; presumably this new department will be playing offense.
I'm curious how it affects the CIA department that create the Vault7 fiasco, since it seemed to exist in a legal grey area. This could move most cyberoffense functions explicitly out of the CIA's jurisdiction.