Kirstjen Nielsen came in with the potential to be the most effective cyber leader in agency history — then she was sideswiped by the president’s fixation on the Mexican border
—has inadvertently made clear the necessity for a stronger DHS role in cyberspace, paving the way for one of the federal government’s most outgunned departments to finally find a coherent mission.
This investigation chronicles the struggle of a young federal agency to carve out a space in the cybersecurity community—a mission that has been hampered by ongoing turf battles with the National Security Agency and FBI, a revolving door of disillusioned leaders, and a struggle to recruit and retain top-tier cybersecurity talent.
Given the pressing threat of terrorism at the time and how the dot-com boom was just years old at the time, “cyber” threats began as a departmental afterthought. That early period for DHS “really was the wild, wild West,” recalls another DHS employee, who is still with the department and spoke anonymously to frankly describe its history.
Until then, most existing cyber expertise inside government was confined to the White House, under what was known as the President’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Board, as well as the NSA and the Pentagon, which had awoken to the cyber threat in the 1990s as it saw individual hackers and foreign adversaries like Russia beginning to target its networks.
Nor was it clear how DHS was supposed to be interacting with other agencies. If the goal was to shore up the entire federal government from potential cyber intrusions, DHS was failing miserably. During a 2004 congressional hearing, Sen. Dianne Feinstein grilled a DHS official over whether DHS had provided any directives to other federal agencies on cyber vulnerabilities—essentially, the entire point of EINSTEIN. The official responded only that DHS “works closely” with other government leaders.
Amit Yoran , director of the cyber-security division of the Department of Homeland Security, testifies during a House subcommittee hearing in June 2004. | Getty Images President George W. Bush speaks with Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff at the Ronald Reagan Building in March 2005. | AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
The sluggish progress at DHS was hardly unique inside the government; writ large, the federal government remained slow to wake up to the cyber threat. Online attacks were not even listed on the 2007 “Worldwide Threat Assessment” list prepared by U.S. intelligence agencies, even as hackers—both rogue actors and those acting at the behest of America’s most powerful adversaries—were growing more prolific and creative by the day.
Indeed, many in government and on Capitol Hill fully expected that if a catastrophic incident occurred, the federal government would simply bypass DHS and bring in NSA. That mindset stymied efforts in invest in DHS; as the Capitol Hill aide recalls, “If so, why are we sort of pretending to put a DHS face on it?”
. DHS had lobbied to be in charge of the effort, but fell short after encountering pushback from other national security agencies, who argued that the five-year-old department “lacked the necessary expertise and authority,” according to a contemporaneousreport. President Bush ultimately concluded the same thing, and appointed the FBI’s National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force the central coordinating body for cyberthreat investigations within the U.S. government.
DHS Secretary Napolitano, according to officials at the department at the time, appeared overcome by the breadth of the department’s myriad responsibilities, from TSA to customs and immigration enforcement to natural disasters, and was “not very engaged” on issues of cybersecurity during her first year on the job. “The DHS machine, even in the Obama administration, [was seen as focused on] counterterrorism, immigration and border security,” one official said.
At the same time, the mere fact that Napolitano appeared to recognize the nation’s rising cyberthreat marked a key turning point for the department. As one DHS official said, using the internal moniker for the secretary and the deputy secretary, “It was the first time we had an S1 or S2 that was really even dealing with the word ‘cyber.’”
The overlapping agency agendas finally reached a breaking point and prompted then-FBI Director Robert Mueller to convene a 2009 meeting with the leaders of DHS, the Justice Department and NSA. Together, they laid out a framework for what came to be known as the “bubble chart,” a document that delineated the cyber responsibilities of each federal agency.
Until that incident, DHS officials say, the Obama administration tended to think of cyber incidents as a technical problem, one-offs, relegating its response to cyberattacks to those with deep technical expertise, instead of viewing the attacks as the work of traditional adversaries moving to a new domain.
Phyllis Schneck, deputy undersecretary for cybersecurity at DHS, speaks to reporters at NCCIC in 2014. | AP Yet as the Obama administration entered its final year, a new cyberattack in an unexpected realm would demonstrate anew how woefully underprepared the U.S. government—and DHS—remained.unfolded and evidence spread of a Russian-linked hacking attack on Democratic Party entities and officials, alarm bells rang across the government, and DHS found itself thrust into an arena it had never considered: election security.
Top: DHS Sec. Jeh Johnson arrives for a Senate hearing. Bottom left: Director of the National Intelligence James Clapper at a February 2016 hearing. Bottom right: President Barack Obama and CIA Director John Brennan. | Getty Images; AP As 2016 progressed, the Obama administration as a whole scrambled to wrap its arms around Russia’s election interference efforts.of the Russian attacks, though one that omitted the specific knowledge of the voting system probe, and senior U.S. officials, including CIA Director John Brennan and Obama himself, privately warned Russia to stay away from the U.S. election.Senate Intelligence Committee report, but they failed “to provide enough information or go to the right people.
Former White House Cybersecurity Coordinator and President's Special Assistant Michael Daniel testifies before a June 2018 Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Russia's interference in the 2016 election. | AP Amid Nielsen’s work with Kelly, it fell to Christopher Krebs, who had been appointed as the assistant secretary for infrastructure protection, a role that didn’t require Senate confirmation, to fill in for the NPPD undersecretary’s role. He spent months operating with one of the most convoluted titles in government, though one that has become more commonplace amid the cascading, long-running vacancies of the Trump era: the Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Under Secretary .
In announcing the center, though, Nielsen seemed to only underscore how confusing DHS’ various efforts had become—she said the new center would serve as a “focal point” for the government’s cybersecurity efforts and news reports called it a 911-style center for cyber incidents, both characterizations that seemed to mimic and overlap with both NPPD’s mission and NCCIC’s approach, not to mention other efforts like the FBI’s cyber investigative task forces.
The bill went further than DHS’ previous efforts to rebrand or overhaul its operations internally and formally elevated the cybersecurity mission to the same stature of other units within DHS by creating the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. In its first year of existence, CISA has continued to face an uphill battle. Just weeks after its official launch, nearly half of the agency’s workforce was sidelined by the long-running government shutdown—with upward of 40 percent of the agency deemed “nonessential,” even as it purported to be combating one of the nation’s biggest threats.
More broadly, the intense partisan politicization of the department amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has made employees, potential employees and industry partners wary of engaging with DHS.
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