QOTD: “tora, tora, tora” edition
by digby
Secretary of Defense nominee Ashton Carter:
In his remarks at Harvard, Carter said another “obvious” national security challenge facing the United States is cybersecurity. But he said the defense establishment has often focused too much on external threats and not on insider ones.
“We had a cyber Pearl Harbor. His name was Edward Snowden,” Carter said, referring to the former intelligence contractor who exposed inner workings of U.S. espionage and surveillance networks.
He said that U.S. security officials who were supposed to safeguard against a mole “screwed up spectacularly in the case of Snowden. And this knucklehead had access to destructive power that was much more than any individual person should have access to.”
Indeed. The Snowden revelations were exactly like the Japanese declaring war. A day which will live in infamy, for sure. I’m glad the new Secretary of Defense understand the threats against us so well. I feel safer already.
And the good news is that he wisely counsels that the government needs to become even more secretive. Because being transparent is like Hitler. (I’m guessing on that last part, but it’s as logical as anything else he said.)