Research Paper
Abstract: At the present time, the United States encounters threats coming from multiple organizations, individuals as well as countries globally. Intelligence is basically utilized in ensuring these threats are mitigated. The summary discusses the ones considered to be at the front line of the United States Intelligence Community who are mainly the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as well as the National Security Agency (NSA).
Background: The CIA was formally created in 1947 to help counter the Soviet threat, which was a response to Pearl Harbor during World War II. Previous U.S. intelligence and counterintelligence efforts had been conducted by the military and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and suffered from duplication, competition, and lack of coordination, problems that continued, to some degree, into the 21st century. On the year of 1952, NSA by President Harry S. Truman. The NSA was created in part out of the belief that the importance and distinct character of communications intelligence warranted an organization distinct from both the armed forces and the other intelligence agencies.
Discussions: Both agencies play the role of gathering intelligence that is foreign in order to inform as well as alert the given government regarding the motivations, activities, intentions in addition to capabilities of the entities that are foreign making attempts to undermine the national security as well as prosperity. The foreign intelligence gets to respond to the intelligence priorities of the government that happen to be at by the cabinet.
Within the CIA as well as the NSA, the hackers of the government in a secretive manner tend to gather as well as store the flaws of software which they end up exploiting later on in order to cause damage or spy on the adversaries of America. However, the same said weaknesses are capable of being turned against any given machine in addition to them being very complex to control immediately they are loosed on the net. Additionally, of late, the government of the United States has ended up proving itself not able to make sure that its own cyber weapons are secure.
The Petya as well as the WannaCry attacks are known for exploiting weaknesses that were made to be public by a given group that is identified as the Shadow Brokers, which ended up releasing them for the time in 2016. It is not well elaborated the manner in which the flaws of the software got to be stolen from the possession of the NSA. This was later on followed by a breach at the CIA that WikiLeaks made claims that it had acquired a trove belonging to the hacking tools of CIA after the known vaunted agency of spy lost control regarding its whole cyber weapons arsenal. This is considered to have the probability of being an overstatement that was made by WikiLeaks, however, a substantial figure in relation to the techniques are considered to have been made public, and till now no single individual has been able to explain the manner in which it occurred or the action that was taken in preventing the same occurrence from taking place again. These thefts end up leaving the spy agencies within positions that are said to be untenable.
Recommendations: For the United States to ensure it safeguards itself and also continues being a global leader, the nation is required to develop as well as consistently refine counterterrorism policies that are sound and suitable to the world that is changing rapidly.