WASHINGTON — Confronted with a vast cyberattack believed to have been carried out by Russia, the Trump administration is suddenly reviving an old idea: Strip the general who leads the United States Cyber Command of his second title as the director of the National Security Agency, the country’s largest spy operation. The idea has been kicking around Washington for years, and the intelligence world has hotly debated its merits. Democrats and Republicans alike say that the two institutions are too intertwined to be managed separately and that any unilateral action by the administration to change the current structure would violate legal requirements for extensive assessments before altering it. They said it was also unclear how such a step, especially carried out hastily during a presidential transition, would help with the current crisis. The United States still has its hands full figuring out how far the Russians penetrated into government systems, what they acquired, how American defenses failed and how to respond.

Source: New York Times December 21, 2020 00:11 UTC