Ex-CISA employee: 'This culture of fear started permeating the agency' It's hard to pinpoint exactly when the "culture of fear" began to permeate America's top cyber-defense agency. It wasn't one particular incident, but rather a death by a thousand cuts, according to a former US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency employee, who spoke to The Register on the condition that we don't …
This isn’t bureaucratic drift or unfortunate turnover. Trump’s team has openly declared its goal: make civil servants afraid, choke their funding, and break the machinery of government from the inside. And it’s working.
CISA’s leadership is bleeding out. Expertise is gone. Capacity is collapsing. And all this happens while America’s political class shrugs, pretending this is some mysterious institutional decay - not sabotage.
The elephant in the room, of course, is that this collapse directly benefits one man: Vladimir Putin. The US president has been serving Russian interests, openly or covertly, for nearly a decade - yet the Washington establishment, the press, the agencies, still act as if the reasons behind this self-destruction are too delicate or complicated to name.
Worse, some still behave as if Trump is a misunderstood genius, sheepishly following along, convinced that somehow, from the ashes, America will “become great again.”
So here we stand: one of the world’s most powerful states, disarming itself in slow motion, facing rising cyber threats, running on skeleton crews - while its leaders smile, gut the systems, and call it reform.
When the blackout comes, when critical infrastructure fails, they will step up to the microphones and ask, with straight faces, “How could this have happened?”
And no one will admit they all watched it happen in plain sight.
To add...
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the ‘culture of fear’ began to permeate America’s top cyber-defense agency.
Oh, really? Maybe when the people they were supposed to serve handed them the axe and said “cut here.”
They built playbooks for foreign threats, cyberattacks, rogue nations - but apparently never paused to imagine a scenario where the enemy holds the Oval Office and waves a little flag while gutting them on live TV.
No grand surprise here. No tragic twist. Just a slow, public demolition - and the very agencies meant to defend the nation dutifully shuffling papers and watching it happen, convinced the system would somehow save itself.
Turns out, when the rot is inside the walls, you don’t need hackers or bombs. You just need a government too naïve, too polite, or too cowardly to call treason by its name.
New Cyber and Electromagnetic Command 'r’ Us
The British military is to spend more than £1 billion on artificial intelligence and a hacking attack team, the Defence Secretary has announced... ...... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/05/29/britain-to-unleash-army-of-hackers-on-putin-ai/
Yes, AI is a bubble, isn't it, although it isn’t, is it ‽. And it's the gift that just keeps on giving and opens up every imaginable supposedly secure door for madness and mayhem to create and exploit deep and dark havoc with CHAOS** within and throughout SCADA*** Systems rendering its IT protocols quite Majestic and MAJICal.****
Nice one, UKGBNI Defence Secretary ..... and thanks for the opening and opportunity to beta test and stealthily exploit newly made readily available vulnerabilities ...... although were you not also advised that such might be extremely unwise and more dangerous than helpful for it certainly can be and therefore will be?
* Advanced IntelAIgently Resourced
** Clouds Hosting Advanced Operating Systems
*** Supervisory Control, Analysis and Data Acquisition
Unbelievable. CISA is one of the bright points from Trump's first term. It is generally well regarded and most security professionals would say it is tax money well spent. I still can't wrap my head around why someone would want to sabotage an agency that isn't controversial and supported by both parties, much less one that they created. Maybe too much of that spray tan has built up in the Orange Baboons system.
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