https://www.cyberscoop.com/john-bolton-book-cybersecurity-nspm-13-crowdstrike/
By Shannon Vavra
CYBERSCOOP
June 22, 2020
In his new book, former national security adviser John Bolton says that
squabbling amongst Trump administration officials hobbled the White House’s
efforts to issue new policies that shaped the U.S. government’s offensive and
defense cyber-operations.
The book, “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir,” which CyberScoop
obtained, provides an insider’s view of the U.S. government’s largely secretive
approach to revamping cyber policy in the last two years. Aside from
cyber-operations, Bolton paints President Donald Trump as preoccupied and
angered by cybersecurity-related issues, as well as all too willing to use
hacking to prop up his political goals in negotiations with China and Ukraine.
“We needed to do two things: first, we needed a Trump Administration cyber
strategy, and second, we needed to scrap the Obama-era [offensive
cyber-operations] rules and replace them with a more agile, expeditious
decision-making structure,” Bolton writes of his time negotiating new policies
with national security and intelligence officials in 2018. “Unfortunately,
bureaucratic inertia, turf fights, and some genuine unresolved issues paralyzed
the Trump Administration, month after month.”
Bolton writes that the Obama administration’s approach to fending off hacking
from China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea had been criticized for not being
aggressive enough. In order to better deter them, the Trump administration had
set its sights on giving U.S. military hackers more leeway to hit back.
[...]
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