Behind the White House’s plan to be more aggressive in cyberspace
The warnings came from Donald Trump’s predecessor, top spies and Kim Jong Un himself.
So when the North Korean leader promised to tame Trump with “fire,” in September 2017, White House leaders considered how to slow the Asian country’s march to developing a nuclear weapon.
During a meeting in late 2017, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis presented a military strategy and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson presented a diplomatic answer. But when it came time to discuss intelligence and hacking options for the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, some on Trump’s team were frustrated with the answer. They argued the NSA couldn’t digitally deter Kim. For nearly a year, White House leaders had debated the rules for how America should operate in cyberspace. After brazen hacks by the Chinese and Russian governments that targeted millions of Americans and the 2016 presidential election respectively, senior officials believed they needed to stop the raid on American bits and bytes.
