A pair of prominent leaders in the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command were withdrawn from their speaking engagements at the upcoming RSAC Conference in San Francisco, California, just days after President Donald Trump fired the top military official who jointly led the intelligence agency and the combatant command.
NSA Cybersecurity Division Director Dave Luber and Cyber Command Executive Director Morgan Adamski were officially pulled out Tuesday afternoon, according to conference notifications and two people familiar with the matter. On Thursday, Trump fired Gen. Timothy Haugh, who led both entities in a dual-hatted role, after far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer recommended he be jettisoned from the position.
There are no indications that Luber and Adamski have been terminated from their roles. Organizers were told the speaking cancellations were due to agency restrictions on non-essential travel, according to a person familiar with the matter.
RSAC Conference referred Nextgov/FCW to the NSA, which did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication. Cyber Command also did not reply to a comment request.
The prominent cybersecurity gathering, scheduled to start April 28, has historically featured top U.S. national security officials in the cyber domain because it allows participants — who predominantly attend from the private sector — to get an eye into the often clandestine cybersecurity work of the U.S. intelligence community and Defense Department. Both Luber and Adamski appeared at the conference last year.
As the surveillance and hacking titan of the U.S. intelligence community, the NSA is considered a core spy agency whose work is featured often in intelligence products produced by various agencies like the CIA or the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Much of the agency’s surveillance findings contribute to significant portions of the president’s daily security briefings.
Cyber Command is a combatant command in the Defense Department focused on securing U.S. critical infrastructure, protecting the DOD’s information network and supporting cyber capabilities in other geographic commands.
Both offices have been traditionally led in a dual-hatted manner. On Monday, a former senior intelligence official said that Haugh’s firing might be used as a basis to split the dual hat, permitting the president to install a loyalist political appointee to solely lead the intelligence agency.
A coalition of Senate Democrats criticized the firing and wrote Monday that terminating the dual arrangement “would severely degrade the speed and effectiveness of NSA’s and CYBERCOM’s abilities to execute their missions and could have dire consequence for our national security.”
