By: M.Dinata *)
The U.S Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) will make the biggest reorganization in its history. CIA Director John Brennan said that CIA needs to be sharpened, in order to fight the wider range of threats, especially in cyber operation. He said the agency have to be able to understand every aspects of the digital environment.
“Our ability to carry out our responsibilities for human intelligence and national security responsibilities has become more challenging,” Brennan said. In order to do that, CIA will create a new directorate called the “Directorate of Digital Innovation” which merge the four existing Directorates: Support, Science and Technology, and Operations and Analysis, under the new organization plan. This new directorate will focus on cyber technology advances that have changed the way espionage is conducted.
Mr. John Brennan also ordered a merger between the agency’s operations and analyst in the 10 new units called “Mission Centers”. The centers will be divided by specific region or by type of threat. “There are a lot of areas that I would like to have better insight to, better information about, better access to,” Brennan said. “I know there are seams right now, but what we’ve tried to do with these mission centers is cover the entire universe, regionally and functionally, and so something that’s going on in the world falls into one of those buckets.”
The aims of this reform is to counter foreign hackers trying to penetrate US computer systems, as well as help American spies steal digital secret data around the world. US has experienced several hackers attacks in the past few years, such as the hacking attack on the Las Vegas Sands Corp, the world’s largest casino company, in February 2014, which was blamed on Iran and the latest incident in November 2014, North Korea was accused of hacking Sony Pictures.
*) The Author is Brunei Darussalam’s Contributor.