Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday (7) approved the creation of a new State Department office to address cybersecurity and emerging technologies in response to challenges from potential competitors such as China and Russia.
In a statement, a State Department spokesman said the new Bureau of Cybersecurity and Emerging Technologies (CSET), will help lead the effort, including reorganizing U.S. security diplomacy in cyberspace and emerging technologies and providing the necessary resources. The statement said the challenges from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and other cyber and emerging technology competitors have continued unabated since the State Department notified Congress of its plan to create CSET in June of the previous year.
Pompeo’s announcement of the new office last year was met with resistance and was shelved by former House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) on the grounds that the new office was “too narrow in scope. It was not until the State Department merged its Office of the Cybersecurity Coordinator with the Bureau of Business and Economic Affairs that the office was formally established. The merger, however, was decided upon when former Secretary of State Tillerson was in office, but it took nearly four years before it became a reality.
In addition, the Washington Examiner reported Thursday that Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) investigator Barry Zulauf earlier investigated whether foreign interference in the 2020 U.S. election. He submitted a report to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday, saying that some analysts intentionally withheld information about China’s intention to interfere in the election because they did not want the information to become a booster that could complement the Trump administration’s hard-line policy toward China, a practice that goes against the principle of analysts’ independence from political considerations.
The report also said that John Ratcliffe, the office’s director, accepted their three recommendations for improvement and argued that analysts used different terms to describe similar behavior by Russia and China, or that the public might be led to believe that only Russia was trying to influence the U.S. election, while China was not.
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