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Secret Presidential directive – could it permit military action within USA?

EPIC filed a FOIA request to find out if the policy directive could mean military deployment within the United States

it allows the Pentagon to pursue actions against adversaries within a vaguely described terrain known only as “cyberspace.”

Exceptionally grave damage: NSA refuses to declassify Obama’s cybersecurity directive http://rt.com/usa/news/nsa-directive-epic-foia-192/   21 November, 2012, Reuters / Adrees Latif The National Security Agency has shot down a Freedom of Information Act request for details about an elusive presidential order that may allow the government to deploy the military within the United States for the supposed sake of cybersecurity.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) reports on Tuesday that their recent FOIA request for information about a top-secret memosigned last month by US President Barack Obama has been rejected

[PDF]. Now attorneys for EPIC say they plan to file an appeal to get
to the bottom of Presidential Policy Directive 20.
Although the executive order has been on the books for a month now,
only last week did details emerge about the order after the Washington
Post reported that Pres. Obama’s signature to the top-secret directive
could allow the White House to send in recruits from the Pentagon to
protect America’s cyber-infrastructure.
Because Presidential Policy Directive 20 is classified, the exact
wording of the elusive document has been a secret kept only by those
with first-hand knowledge of the memo. For their November 14 article,
the Post spoke with sources that saw the document to report that the
directive “effectively enables the military to act more aggressively
to thwart cyberattacks on the nation’s web of government and private
computer networks.”
In response to the Post’s report, EPIC filed a FOIA request to find
out if the policy directive could mean military deployment within the
United States, especially since the sources who have seen the memo say
it allows the Pentagon to pursue actions against adversaries within a vaguely described terrain known only as “cyberspace.”
“What it does, really for the first time, is it explicitly talks about
how we will use cyber-operations,” a senior administration official
told the Post. “Network defense is what you’re doing inside your own
networks. . . . Cyber-operations is stuff outside that space, and
recognizing that you could be doing that for what might be called
defensive purposes.”
“We’d like to see what the language says and see what power is given,”
EPIC attorney Amie Stepanovich told RT this week — a matter that will
now have to be appealed before any details can be determined.
News of the directive comes just as lawmakers in Congress failed once
again to approve a cybersecurity legislation that would provide new
connections between the federal government and the private sector in
order to supposedly ramp up the United States’ protection from foreign
hackers. With the defeat of that bill, though, members of both the
House and Senate now say they expect Pres. Obama to sign a separate
executive order that will lay down the groundwork for a more thorough
cybersecurity plan to be established.
Meanwhile, the commander-in-chief has already signed a secret order —
Presidential Policy Directive 20 — that might remain classified unless
EPIC can win in court.
“We believe that the public hasn’t been able to involve themselves in
the cybersecurity debate, and the reason they can’t involve themselves
is because they don’t have the right amount of information,”
Stepanovich tells RT.
Responding to the FOIA request, the NSA says releasing information on
the directive cannot occur because “disclosure could reasonably be
expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national
security.”
“Because the document is currently and properly classified, it is
exempt from disclosure,” the NSA writes.

November 22, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA