The Rise of the NSA | 205
gon belatedly created the U.S. Cyber Command in 2009. In it, the cyber-defense units of the army, navy, marines, and air force cyber forces were merged together and put under the command of the NSA director. General Keith Alexander became the first director of this new command. One problem for the Cyber Command was separating attacks by civilians, including criminals, hacktivists, and anarchists, from cyber warfare sponsored and supported by adver- sary states. Because foreign intelligence services often closely imi- tated the tools of civilian hackers, and were even known to provide them with hacking tools, it was not easy for the Cyber Command to unambiguously determine if the ultimate perpetrator of a cyber attack was state sponsored. For example, the identification of North Korea as the principal actor behind the attack on Sony in December 2014 appeared to be a rare success, but many cyber-security experts believed that it might be a false trail used to hide the real attacker. Clues could be fabricated in cyberspace to point to the wrong party.
The job of the Cyber Command was to prevent such an attack. To
this end, it planted viruses on hundreds of thousands of computers
© in private hands to act as sentinels to spot other suspicious viruses ® that could mount such an attack. Private computers had become a new battleground in the cyber wars. It also built a capability to retaliate. Still, cyber attacks, which were launched through layers of other countries’ computers, could not be unambiguously traced back to the true perpetrator.
This escalation by the Cyber Command set the stage for expanded forms of warfare in cyberspace. “The Chinese are viewed as the source of a great many attacks on western infrastructure and just recently, the U.S. electrical grid,” General Alexander said in explain- ing the need for this consolidation. “If that is determined to be an organized attack, I would want to go and take down the source of those attacks.” The same retaliation would presumably be used against Russia, Iran, or any other adversary. Dominance of cyber- space itself now became part of the NSA’s mandate.
Even so, the most important job of the NSA remained intercept- ing secret information from Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. To this end, it had an annual budget of $12.3 billion and some thirty- five thousand military and civilian employees. In 2013, James Clap-
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