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WASHINGTON — If the trilateral security pact between the US, United Kingdom and Australia, dubbed AUKUS, is going to succeed, the United States needs to change its attitude about its ability to protect information in light of recent “security breaches,” a senior Republican congressman said today.
“We go into this sometimes with an arrogance to say nobody can protect information like we can,” Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., said during an event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “We look sort of speciously at our friends… [and] with what we’ve gone through here recently, with security breaches, we should be the last ones to be lecturing somebody else about what they need to do.”
Wittman is a senior congressman on the House Armed Services Committee, one of several congressional panels with oversight over AUKUS. He’s also one of several congressmen who have been vocal about the need to disentangle the complicated set of laws that effectively prohibit the US from executing one of AUKUS’s key pillars: sharing advanced technologies with Australia. Those laws are collectively known as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, or ITAR.
The congressman today at CSIS said that under current laws the US treats certain allies “better” than Australia, despite AUKUS representing one of the “deepest” pacts held with any foreign nation around the world.
“That dichotomy is unacceptable,” he said. “I’ve been working with now the new ambassador to the United States, Kevin Rudd… How do we fix ITAR? How do we make sure that it truly is adaptive, that it responds to changing threats around the world, and make sure to that we operate with our closest friends and allies from a higher level of trust.”
Without citing a specific event, Wittman said recent “security breaches” are evidence the US should be expected to demonstrate its ability to protect information in the same manner it expects from its partners and allies.
RELATED: Pentagon Review Finds No ‘Single Point Of Failure’ In Discord Leaks, Proposes New Office To Monitor Users
In April, a 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard was criminally charged with sharing classified information about the Russia-Ukraine war on Discord, a social media application commonly used for online gaming.
The high-profile leak prompted the Pentagon to consider a new office for monitoring user activities. It also led to senior military officers making absolute — although potentially unsustainable — promises for the future.
“I’m very confident this will never happen again,” Army Gen. Daniel Hokanson, chief of the National Guard Bureau, told senators during a June hearing. “This one individual took an individual action and is not indicative of the entire system. We are looking at safeguards that we can put in place that would prevent any individual in the future from ever being able to do this.”
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