In a letter given to US Senator Charles E. Grassley, National Security Agency Inspector General George Ellard confirmed that some employees used agency surveillance technology to spy on their romantic interests. Ellard said there were 12 substantiated instances of this misuse in over 10 years. The employees had used the NSA's signals intelligence (SIGINT) technology, more popularly known as Loveint, to spy on several people.
NSA Director General Keith Alexander told a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing that appropriate action had been taken on the cases. "Several of these cases were referred to the Department of Justice for potential prosecution, appropriate discipline action in other cases," he said.
According to a Bloomberg report, the Pentagon five-year cybersecurity budget would be pegged at USD 23 billion until 2018. The budget document revealed that the Pentagon would be requesting USD 4.72 billion in fiscal year 2015 and another USD 4.61 billion the year after. In 2017, it would be requesting USD 4.45 billion and then USD 4.53 billion in 2018. It would also request another USD 9.3 billion to develop systems that would prevent hackers from accessing Pentagon computers until 2018. It would also be asking for USD 8.9 billion to beef up the defensive and offensive capabilities of its cyber-operations.
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