Ever since stories about the National Security Agency’s (NSA) electronic intelligence-gathering capabilities began tumbling out last June, The New York Times has published more than a dozen editorials excoriating the “national surveillance state.” It wants the NSA to end the “mass warehousing of everyone’s data” and the use of “back doors” to break encrypted communications. A major element of the Times’ critique is that the NSA’s domestic sweeps are not justified by the terrorist threat they aim to prevent.

At the end of August, in the midst of the Times’ assault on the NSA, the newspaper suffered what it described as a “malicious external attack” on its domain name registrar at the hands of the Syrian Electronic Army, a group of hackers who support Syrian President Bashar Al Assad. The paper’s website was down for several hours and, for some people, much longer. “In terms of the sophistication of the attack, this is a big deal,” said Marc Frons, the Times’ chief information officer. Ten months earlier, hackers stole the corporate passwords for every employee at the Times, accessed the computers of 53 employees, and breached the e-mail accounts of two reporters who cover China. “We brought in the FBI, and the FBI said this had all the hallmarks of hacking by the Chinese military,” Frons said at the time. He also acknowledged that the hackers were in the Times system on election night in 2012 and could have “wreaked havoc” on its coverage if they wanted.





Such cyber-intrusions threaten corporate America and the U.S. government every day. “Relentless assaults on America’s computer networks by China and other foreign governments, hackers and criminals have created an urgent need for safeguards to protect these vital systems,” the Times editorial page noted last year while supporting legislation encouraging the private sector to share cybersecurity information with the government. It cited General Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, who had noted a 17-fold increase in cyber-intrusions on critical infrastructure from 2009 to 2011 and who described the losses in the United States from cyber-theft as “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.” If a “catastrophic cyber-attack occurs,” the Timesconcluded, “Americans will be justified in asking why their lawmakers ... failed to protect them.”

When catastrophe strikes, the public will adjust its tolerance for intrusive government measures.

The Times editorial board is quite right about the seriousness of the cyber- threat and the federal government’s responsibility to redress it. What it does not appear to realize is the connection between the domestic NSA surveillance it detests and the governmental assistance with cybersecurity it cherishes. To keep our computer and telecommunication networks secure, the government will eventually need to monitor and collect intelligence on those networks using techniques similar to ones the Timesand many others find reprehensible when done for counterterrorism ends.

The fate of domestic surveillance is today being fought around the topic of whether it is needed to stop Al Qaeda from blowing things up. But the fight tomorrow, and the more important fight, will be about whether it is necessary to protect our ways of life embedded in computer networks.