On August 12, 2026, the White House issued a presidential memorandum with a bureaucratic title and an idea hidden inside it that is considerably more dramatic than the language of federal administration usually allows. Under the new policy, vetted American companies may be authorized to conduct cyber-surveillance and cyber-effects operations against foreign cyber-enabled transnational criminal organizations. The National Coordination Center will administer the program under joint Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security oversight. Companies will be required to enter contracts, undergo vetting, submit operational packages for approval, and act only under written federal direction.

In the familiar vocabulary of Washington, this is a public-private partnership. That description is accurate in the same way that calling an aircraft carrier a transportation platform is accurate. It tells us what category of object we are looking at while carefully avoiding the thing that makes the object interesting.

The United States is creating an institutional mechanism through which private corporations may be permitted to penetrate foreign computer systems without the consent of their owners and, when authorized, manipulate, disrupt, deny, degrade, or destroy information systems, networks, infrastructure, and data. The memorandum separately contemplates covert cyber-surveillance: unauthorized access intended to remain undetected. These are powers normally associated with intelligence services, military organizations, and law-enforcement agencies operating under exceptional legal authority. They are now to be made available, under government supervision, to selected private firms.

This is not the legalization of indiscriminate corporate “hack back,” an idea that has circulated for years among companies frustrated by ransomware crews, data thieves, and foreign intruders. A company that suffers an intrusion cannot simply trace an attacker to an overseas server and retaliate. The new program is deliberately constructed to prevent that kind of vigilantism. The government selects the permissible category of target, approves the operation, establishes its boundaries, and retains the authority to terminate it. A participating company that discovers that an operation has exceeded those boundaries is supposed to stop and report what happened.

Those safeguards matter. They also make the policy more consequential, not less. A private company acting under federal direction is not merely protecting its own network. It is exercising public power. Once that distinction is understood, the central argument changes. The question is no longer whether corporations should be allowed to defend themselves aggressively. It is whether the United States should create a private market for the controlled exercise of offensive cyber power, and, if it does, what kinds of institutions will grow around that market.

The historical analogy that arrives almost too easily is privateering. Governments once authorized privately owned ships to attack enemy commerce under letters of marque, converting private capital and private crews into instruments of national power. The analogy is imperfect. The companies contemplated by the White House memorandum are not independent captains hunting prizes, nor does the policy amount to a modern letter of marque. They would be contractors operating under executive authority and subject to specific direction. But the analogy persists because it points toward the underlying political problem. A sovereign is proposing to delegate a portion of its coercive capacity to private actors, and those actors will be paid for exercising it.

That arrangement may prove useful. It may also prove extraordinarily difficult to govern.

The policy has a strong strategic logic behind it. Much of the digital terrain on which modern conflict occurs is privately owned. Cloud providers see malicious activity before governments do. Endpoint-security firms collect telemetry from millions of systems. Telecommunications companies observe routing behavior and infrastructure abuse. Financial institutions see fraudulent transfers and laundering patterns. Domain registrars, identity providers, hosting companies, and content-delivery networks often possess detailed evidence about adversary operations long before that evidence reaches federal investigators. Cybersecurity firms employ researchers capable of identifying command-and-control servers, reversing malware, mapping criminal networks, and discovering vulnerabilities at a speed that government organizations cannot always match.

The American state, meanwhile, possesses legal authorities and intelligence capabilities that private firms do not. The obvious temptation is to combine the two.

Until now, a company that identified the infrastructure of a ransomware gang might provide intelligence to law enforcement, assist in a civil seizure, cooperate with hosting providers, or help obtain a court order. Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit has spent years demonstrating how effective such collaboration can be, using litigation and judicial process to seize domains and dismantle pieces of malicious infrastructure. But these approaches are often slow, jurisdictionally constrained, or dependent on cooperation from foreign governments that may be indifferent, corrupt, hostile, or themselves beneficiaries of the criminal activity.

The cybercriminal does not share these handicaps. A fraud operation may use servers in four countries, payment processors in two more, compromised routers scattered around the world, and cryptocurrency exchanges in jurisdictions whose law-enforcement agencies will never answer an American request. The entire enterprise can relocate before the first mutual legal-assistance request has completed its paperwork. The attacker operates at network speed. The state often operates at diplomatic speed.

The White House is trying to reduce that asymmetry.

There are scenarios in which the utility of such a program is easy to imagine. A ransomware organization is actively attacking American hospitals from infrastructure located in a jurisdiction that refuses cooperation. A botnet is preparing a large-scale assault on critical infrastructure. A fraud network is stealing millions of dollars each day while its operators enjoy protection from local authorities. An American cybersecurity firm has already penetrated the surrounding technical environment sufficiently to identify the infrastructure, understand how it functions, and know exactly which intervention would disable it. Under the old model, the company might hand the information to Washington and wait. Under the new model, the government might authorize the company to act.

There is nothing inherently absurd about that idea. Indeed, in a digital environment dominated by private infrastructure and private expertise, insisting that every offensive capability remain entirely inside government may eventually become as artificial as insisting that the government manufacture all of its own aircraft.

The difficulty is that weapons markets do not remain mere procurement arrangements. They create institutions, incentives, constituencies, dependencies, and political habits. Offensive cyber contracting is likely to do the same.

The first problem is attribution, and it lies at the center of the new policy. The memorandum limits eligible targets to foreign cyber-enabled criminal organizations that are not institutional components of foreign governments and are not wholly operated under foreign-government direction. This sounds like a sensible boundary between law enforcement and interstate conflict. The trouble is that the boundary itself describes one of the murkiest regions in modern cyber operations.

Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea have all operated within ecosystems in which the distinctions among criminal groups, intelligence contractors, tolerated hackers, patriotic auxiliaries, and government personnel can be deliberately obscure. A ransomware group may be financially motivated while receiving tacit protection from state security services. A contractor may conduct espionage for a government on one occasion and ordinary theft on another. A criminal operator may sell access to an intelligence agency without becoming a government employee. A state may deliberately exercise influence without exercising the kind of total control that lawyers would describe as direction.

This ambiguity is not an accidental defect in the system. It is often the system’s strategic advantage.

The memorandum nevertheless establishes a revealing presumption: unless clear intelligence establishes a government connection, a foreign criminal organization is to be presumed not to be part of, or wholly directed by, a foreign government. Administratively, the rule makes sense. A program that required metaphysical certainty about every target’s relationship to a foreign state would never operate. Strategically, however, the presumption may be exactly backward.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, particularly in intelligence work. Before authorizing a destructive cyber operation against infrastructure connected to a Russian or Iranian organization, the United States might reasonably demand affirmative confidence that the target is not participating in a state operation whose significance is poorly understood. A ransomware server can be both a criminal asset and an intelligence asset. A compromised host may be used simultaneously by criminals and by a state service that has quietly purchased access. Destroying it may therefore produce consequences far beyond the criminal ecosystem visible to the contractor proposing the operation.

The risk is not merely that the United States might hit the wrong hacker. It might inadvertently interfere with the wrong government.

This problem becomes more serious because offensive operations occur in an Internet architecture built almost entirely from intermediaries. Malicious traffic rarely emerges from a machine conveniently owned by the malicious actor. Attackers compromise residential routers, rent virtual servers under false identities, hijack cloud accounts, use university systems, route communications through hacked web servers, and hide behind other victims. A server used by a ransomware gang may share physical hardware with dozens of innocent customers. A command node may sit inside the network of a company that has no idea it has been compromised. An IP address can identify a threat one hour and an innocent tenant the next.

For years, this has been the strongest technical argument against private hack back. A defender who sees traffic coming from another system often has no way of knowing whether that system belongs to the attacker or to another victim. Federal supervision improves the intelligence available to the operator, but it does not repeal the architecture of the Internet. The risk of collateral damage remains, and its significance rises with the destructive authority available to the contractor.

The White House appears aware of the danger. The memorandum distinguishes ordinary cyber effects from “Critical Outcomes,” including operations likely to cause death or serious physical injury or to rise to the level of a use of force or armed attack under international law. Such operations fall outside the normal approval structure contemplated by the program. This is an important limitation, but it also reveals the enormous category of coercive activity lying beneath the threshold of armed attack. A cyber operation can destroy a company, erase irreplaceable data, interrupt industrial production, cripple a logistics network, or inflict hundreds of millions of dollars in losses without killing anyone. Much of modern cyber conflict exists precisely in this legally ambiguous territory.

The memorandum also permits the government to require a bond or escrow of at least one million dollars from participating companies. The provision seems intended to create financial accountability for violations of contractual terms. It is difficult to imagine a better illustration of the mismatch between ordinary contracting mechanisms and strategic cyber risk.

For a small specialist security company, a million-dollar bond may be a formidable barrier to entry. For a multinational technology or defense contractor, it is practically trivial. The requirement may therefore be simultaneously too onerous for some of the firms whose specialized expertise the government most wants and too insignificant to constrain the firms with the greatest capacity to cause harm. If an improperly executed operation disrupts a major cloud platform, corrupts industrial equipment, or produces a diplomatic crisis, forfeiting a million dollars will look less like accountability than a transaction fee.

The underlying problem is that cyber operations cannot be governed as though they were ordinary professional services. A contractor building a parking garage can be fined for missing a deadline. A contractor exercising state-authorized destructive power requires something closer to a constitutional framework.

This becomes particularly urgent when one considers who will be permitted to enter the program. The memorandum contemplates participation by both large firms and smaller specialist companies. But admission itself may become an enormously valuable asset. A company allowed to conduct offensive operations under federal authority could gain access to classified intelligence, operational relationships with federal agencies, advanced threat data, privileged technical knowledge, and practical experience unavailable to competitors.

A legal boundary will therefore become a market boundary.

The firms inside the program may be permitted to develop capabilities that firms outside it cannot lawfully use. They may recruit researchers by offering access to missions otherwise possible only in government. They may build proprietary knowledge about adversary infrastructure using intelligence their commercial competitors cannot see. Federal contracts may subsidize offensive research that later improves their defensive products. Their relationship with the state may itself become a powerful credential when competing for other work.

This is how an offensive-cyber oligopoly could emerge without anyone explicitly deciding to create one.

The analogy with the military-industrial complex is tempting, but the cyber version has unusual features. Traditional defense contractors manufacture objects that can usually be counted: aircraft, missiles, ships, radars. Cyber contractors deal in knowledge. Their most valuable assets may be vulnerabilities, access, credentials, exploit chains, infrastructure maps, implants, software, and relationships. These assets are difficult for outsiders to inspect and often impossible to disclose publicly without destroying their usefulness. The industry could therefore combine the political influence of defense contracting with the opacity of intelligence work.

The gatekeeping question quickly becomes political. Which companies are considered trustworthy enough to receive offensive authority? Who decides? How much of the decision is based on technical competence, how much on previous government relationships, and how much on the familiar circulatory system through which officials become consultants, consultants become contractors, and contractors return to government? How does a new company challenge an incumbent whose very participation in classified operations has given it expertise the challenger cannot legally acquire?

None of these problems requires corruption. They emerge naturally from the structure of the market.

The incentive problem may be even more troublesome. Cybersecurity companies already profit from the existence of cyber threats. There is nothing sinister about this; firefighters are paid because fires exist, and doctors are paid because people become ill. But the new arrangement may allow the same institution to detect a threat, characterize it, recommend a government response, and then receive a contract to execute that response.

The conflict of interest is obvious. If a company discovers that a particular criminal network presents an urgent danger, and if the company is also uniquely positioned to receive a lucrative contract to attack that network, its judgment is no longer economically neutral. The company may be completely sincere and still inhabit an incentive structure that rewards expansive threat perception.

Modern bureaucracies are remarkably responsive to this sort of incentive. A defense contractor rarely needs to fabricate a geopolitical threat; the world supplies plenty of real ones. The danger lies in the gradual transformation of every problem into a problem best addressed by the product or service the contractor happens to sell.

Cybersecurity could develop the same pattern. A threat-intelligence firm identifies malicious infrastructure, produces a sophisticated report describing its danger, briefs government officials, proposes an offensive campaign, and then explains that it possesses the precise capabilities needed to carry it out. At each stage, the company's work may be excellent. The structural conflict remains.

The simplest remedy is institutional separation. The company that nominates a target should not control the process that validates it. Intelligence used to justify an operation should receive independent review. The office deciding whether an operation is necessary should not be economically dependent on increasing the volume of operations. Post-operation assessments should be conducted by people who did not design the mission. These are unglamorous procedural safeguards, but democracies survive largely through unglamorous procedures.

An offensive contracting market will also intensify one of cybersecurity’s oldest unresolved arguments: whether vulnerabilities should be disclosed or retained.

Suppose a participating contractor discovers a previously unknown flaw in a widely deployed firewall. Disclosing the flaw to the manufacturer could protect thousands of American companies, hospitals, utilities, and government agencies. Keeping it secret could provide access to infrastructure used by a foreign criminal organization. The defensive interest favors disclosure. The offensive mission favors retention.

Governments already make such decisions through vulnerability-equities processes. Extending offensive capabilities into private industry multiplies the number of organizations confronting the same dilemma, while adding commercial motives that government agencies do not necessarily possess. A contractor might profit from maintaining exclusive knowledge of a vulnerability because the exploit makes the company uniquely useful to its federal customer.

The history of offensive tooling provides little reason for complacency. Cyber weapons are unusual because they can be stolen, copied perfectly, and redeployed at negligible cost. The exploits used in the 2017 WannaCry outbreak demonstrated what can happen when highly capable tools escape their original custodians. Unlike a stolen missile, a stolen exploit does not disappear from the original arsenal when it is copied. Both sides now possess it.

The more companies that maintain offensive repositories, the more places exist from which those repositories can leak. Every additional contractor means more developers, more build systems, more credentials, more administrators, more laptops, more subcontractors, more backup systems, and more opportunities for foreign intelligence services to penetrate the supply chain. The program will therefore create a paradox familiar throughout security policy: expanding offensive capability simultaneously expands the number of secrets that must be defended perfectly.

The participating companies themselves will become extraordinarily attractive intelligence targets. A commercial cybersecurity vendor may already interest foreign governments, but a firm known to conduct federally authorized offensive operations would occupy a different category. Its employees could possess targeting information, classified intelligence, zero-day vulnerabilities, implants, covert infrastructure, or knowledge of upcoming operations. Foreign intelligence services would have compelling reasons to identify those employees, compromise their personal devices, recruit insiders, corrupt their software supply chains, and steal their source code.

Criminal organizations may have even fewer inhibitions. Operators could be doxxed. Their families could be threatened. Companies could suffer retaliatory ransomware attacks or physical intimidation. Employees travelling abroad could discover that American authorization does not immunize them from foreign criminal law. A penetration tester who once worried primarily about phishing and credential theft might suddenly have to consider arrest by a foreign government.

The danger does not end with the contractor. It can extend to the contractor’s customers.

American technology companies operate globally partly because foreign customers accept a complicated proposition: although the companies are American and subject to American law, their products remain commercial infrastructure rather than extensions of American intelligence or military power. That distinction has already been tested repeatedly by surveillance controversies, sanctions, export controls, and geopolitical competition. Formal participation in offensive cyber operations could erode it further.

Imagine a large cloud provider, cybersecurity company, or identity platform becoming an acknowledged participant in state-directed offensive operations. A foreign government purchasing its services may reasonably wonder what relationship exists between the vendor’s commercial telemetry and its national-security work. A multinational company may ask whether using the vendor increases the likelihood of becoming entangled in geopolitical retaliation. Rival governments will certainly use the arrangement rhetorically, arguing that American technology firms are not neutral companies at all but components of American cyber power.

The claim will often be exaggerated. It may nevertheless be commercially damaging.

This is one of the strange features of privatizing offensive capacity: the government gains access to private expertise while private companies inherit some of the geopolitical liabilities of government agencies. The exchange may be worthwhile, but it is not free.

There is also the effect on labor. Offensive cybersecurity is glamorous. Defensive cybersecurity usually is not. The public imagination is naturally more interested in the researcher who develops an exploit than the engineer who spends six months eliminating memory-safety bugs. The government program could amplify that imbalance by creating a prestigious new class of offensive operators with access to classified missions and sophisticated tooling.

Talented researchers respond to incentives. If federal money, professional status, and intellectual excitement concentrate in offensive work, more talent will move toward finding ways to break systems rather than making systems harder to break. The United States could become exceptionally skilled at attacking fragile infrastructure while continuing to depend on fragile infrastructure of its own.

That possibility leads to perhaps the most important strategic caution. Offensive cyber capability cannot become a substitute for resilience.

Washington has repeatedly struggled with the unromantic work of securing critical infrastructure. Water systems run obsolete equipment. Hospitals remain vulnerable to ransomware. Small municipalities lack security staff. Network appliances sit unpatched on the public Internet. Industrial systems were often designed in eras when their creators never imagined that they would be exposed to global networks. The temptation to answer this vulnerability with a more vigorous capacity to punish attackers is politically understandable. Punishment is visible. Resilience is maintenance.

A successful offensive operation produces a story: servers seized, infrastructure disrupted, adversaries harmed. Successful defense often produces nothing at all. The hospital stays open. The power remains on. The attack fails. There is no dramatic footage of a vulnerability that was quietly patched six months before anyone tried to exploit it.

Public policy rewards spectacle. Cybersecurity requires discipline.

Any expansion of offensive power should therefore be matched by an insistence that the United States remain capable of absorbing retaliation. This is especially important because offensive action can alter adversary incentives. A criminal group whose infrastructure is destroyed may seek revenge. A state that discovers an American contractor operating inside a network it considers strategically important may respond against the contractor, its customers, or unrelated American infrastructure. Even when neither side intends escalation, each response changes the other side's threat perception.

Cyber operations are particularly susceptible to this kind of misinterpretation because intent is often invisible. A penetration that appears to be surveillance may be preparation for sabotage. Malware intended for one target may resemble malware capable of affecting many. A disrupted criminal server may also contain intelligence being collected by a foreign government. An action authorized as law enforcement may be perceived abroad as espionage, economic coercion, or preparation for military operations.

The memorandum tries to preserve a boundary by excluding operations expected to produce “Critical Outcomes,” including death, serious physical injury, or effects rising to the level of armed attack. Yet history suggests that escalation often begins below formally recognized thresholds. States compete precisely in the gray zones where an action is serious enough to matter and ambiguous enough to avoid demanding war.

Private contractors do not remove this danger. In some ways they may intensify it.

A foreign government is unlikely to regard a destructive operation as “private” merely because the keyboard belonged to a corporation. If the United States approved the target, directed the mission, and provided the legal authority, the action will quite reasonably be understood as American state conduct. Federal control strengthens domestic legitimacy, but it also strengthens international attribution.

The government cannot have this both ways. It cannot insist that contractors possess public authority when shielding them from domestic liability and then describe them as private actors when another country objects.

This raises another question that should concern Washington: what precedent is the United States establishing for everyone else?

American officials have long criticized states that rely on nominally private hackers, criminal groups, contractors, and patriotic auxiliaries to advance national objectives. The model being created now is more disciplined than many of those arrangements. It requires written approval, formal contracts, defined targets, oversight, and adherence to law. These distinctions are important. But international norms are rarely built from distinctions that only one side finds persuasive.

Once the United States establishes the principle that private companies may conduct destructive cyber operations abroad under state authorization, other governments will adapt the principle to their own systems. Russia could authorize security firms to act against what it describes as anti-Russian cybercriminals. China could empower technology companies to disrupt infrastructure associated with online fraud, separatist activity, or intellectual-property theft. Iran could create licensed cyber auxiliaries. Each government could produce legal documents, oversight committees, and carefully worded definitions of permissible targets.

Washington would then need to explain why the American version is legitimate and the foreign version is not.

The answer cannot simply be that American institutions are more trustworthy. A durable international principle must be capable of surviving adoption by governments one distrusts. Before normalizing a new form of state power, the United States should ask whether it would be comfortable living in a world where its adversaries claim the same authority.

That test does not necessarily doom the program. It may instead clarify the rules it needs. Governments might distinguish operations directed against demonstrably criminal infrastructure from attacks on ordinary civilian networks. They might require high confidence in attribution, proportionality, necessity, and avoidance of third-party harm. They might develop notification mechanisms when infrastructure in allied countries is involved. They might create norms against destructive effects on critical civilian systems. The United States could use its own program to model restraint rather than merely capability.

But modeling restraint requires transparency, and transparency is where the policy becomes politically awkward.

The memorandum requires annual reporting inside the executive branch, while some operational details will necessarily remain classified. There are legitimate reasons for secrecy. Publishing target lists, exploits, sources, access methods, or operational infrastructure would make the program useless. Yet secrecy produces a familiar democratic dilemma. The activities most capable of causing international incidents are often the activities least visible to the public.

It is insufficient to answer this problem with assurances that the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security will supervise the program responsibly. Perhaps they will. Institutional design should not depend on confidence in the current officeholders. A meaningful system of oversight must remain credible when controlled by an administration one distrusts.

This point is especially important because offensive authority has a tendency to expand. The current program is directed toward foreign cyber-enabled transnational criminal organizations. Nothing in the memorandum grants companies a general authority to attack political opponents, journalists, activists, domestic hackers, or ordinary foreign businesses. Claims that it does would be inaccurate.

But bureaucratic capabilities acquire new missions once they exist. The expensive part is building the machinery: secure facilities, vetted operators, classified interfaces, procurement systems, legal doctrines, operational procedures, command structures, and technical tools. Once established, expanding the category of permissible target is administratively easier.

Today the target may be a ransomware organization. Tomorrow policymakers may ask whether the same machinery should be used against sanctions evaders, foreign spyware firms, intellectual-property thieves, influence operations, mercenary surveillance companies, state-directed hackers, or infrastructure supporting hostile intelligence services. Some of these expansions may be defensible. The point is that the institution will create pressure to consider them.

That is why Congress should not remain a spectator.

The Constitution places consequential powers involving war, appropriations, and letters of marque and reprisal in Congress for a reason. The program may be structured legally as a law-enforcement and intelligence initiative rather than an exercise of military force, and existing federal statutes contain exceptions for lawfully authorized government investigative and intelligence activity. But the constitutional question is larger than whether executive-branch lawyers can locate sufficient statutory authority to launch the first operation.

A durable architecture for privatized offensive cyber activity deserves explicit legislative consideration. Congress should determine who may participate, what categories of targets are eligible, what reporting is mandatory, what liabilities attach to errors, what protections apply to operators acting within authorization, and what mechanisms exist for compensating innocent third parties. It should establish inspector-general access, congressional notification thresholds, retention requirements for operational logs, and a statutory sunset requiring the government to return and demonstrate that the program actually works.

The last requirement may be the most important.

Offensive programs are notoriously difficult to evaluate because their failures can be interpreted as arguments for expansion. If a criminal network is disrupted, the operation is presented as evidence of success. If the network survives, advocates can argue that more resources are required. If a replacement network appears, it proves the threat remains serious. If adversaries become more sophisticated, that too becomes a reason for additional capability.

An institution operating under that logic can become impossible to falsify.

The government therefore needs measurements established before the program matures. How much victimization did an operation prevent? How quickly did the criminal organization reconstitute its infrastructure? How many innocent systems were affected? How many diplomatic complaints resulted? How often did intelligence later reveal state connections that were not understood when the operation was approved? How many vulnerabilities were retained for offensive use rather than disclosed to vendors? How many contractors themselves suffered retaliatory compromise? Did attacks on American organizations decline, shift, or simply migrate?

These are not accounting questions. They are the difference between strategy and theater.

A responsible program would also impose unusually strict controls on offensive tools. Exploit repositories should be compartmented. Access should be hardware-backed and individually attributable. Builds should be reproducible. Operational software should be cryptographically signed. Tool use should be logged in tamper-evident systems. Contractors should be required to report suspected compromise immediately, even when doing so is commercially embarrassing. Serious violations should produce debarment, not merely fines.

Target validation should be separated from target execution. Companies should not be permitted to create their own business by simultaneously discovering, defining, recommending, and prosecuting threats. Operations touching infrastructure in allied countries should require either consultation with the host government or an unusually high level of authorization. Destructive operations affecting third-party infrastructure should face a considerably higher threshold than operations against assets confidently controlled by the adversary.

The state-attribution presumption deserves particular reconsideration. If intelligence cannot determine whether a criminal organization is connected to a government, the uncertainty should not automatically become permission. In some environments, uncertainty itself is the warning.

There should also be clear protection for individual operators. An employee carrying out an approved operation exactly as directed should not be left personally exposed because the legal architecture becomes politically inconvenient after an incident. Conversely, government authorization should not become a universal shield for employees or companies that knowingly exceed approved boundaries. A functioning system has to distinguish obedience from recklessness.

None of these safeguards resolves the deepest objection, which is moral and political rather than technical: certain powers change character when they become commercial services.

The ability to destroy another party’s information systems is one of them.

A government agency that exercises such power is at least theoretically answerable through a chain of public authority. Officials can be investigated, administrations can be voted out, budgets can be cut, statutes can be changed, and agencies can be reorganized. Corporate power obeys a different logic. A company has fiduciary duties, revenue targets, investors, competitive ambitions, intellectual property, and incentives to preserve valuable lines of business. The moment offensive cyber operations become profitable, the United States will have created organizations with an economic interest in the continuation of offensive cyber operations.

This does not mean they will manufacture threats. It means that the country should not be naïve about what happens when a public-security mission becomes an industry.

The American defense establishment offers plenty of examples of how quickly temporary relationships become permanent ecosystems. Contractors develop expertise the government comes to depend upon. That dependency increases their political influence. Their employees move into government positions; government officials move into industry. Programs survive because eliminating them would also eliminate skills the state no longer maintains internally. Capabilities once considered extraordinary become routine elements of procurement.

Cyber operations may be especially susceptible to this dynamic because expertise moves rapidly and government salaries cannot always compete with private industry. The more Washington outsources offensive capability, the more difficult rebuilding that capability internally may become. Eventually, the state could find itself unable to conduct certain operations without the assistance of the firms it regulates.

At that point privatization ceases to be a way of supplementing sovereignty and begins to alter sovereignty itself.

Yet it would be equally naïve to pretend that the previous arrangement was satisfactory. America’s adversaries have already blurred the lines among state, contractor, and criminal power. Ransomware groups operate from jurisdictions that tolerate them. Intelligence services purchase access from criminals. Governments use contractors to expand capacity and conceal responsibility. Criminal infrastructure can inflict consequences on hospitals, financial systems, transportation networks, and ordinary citizens that would once have been considered matters of national security.

The United States has spent years maintaining a cleaner conceptual distinction between public and private action while operating in an environment where its adversaries often do not. There is a legitimate strategic question about whether that restraint has become self-defeating.

The August memorandum is, in one sense, Washington’s answer: not an abandonment of state authority but an attempt to harness private capability while keeping the state in command. The companies will not receive independent permission to wage cyber war. They will receive narrowly defined authority to act as instruments of federal policy.

That is the best argument in the program’s favor. It may allow the government to move faster, exploit better intelligence, reach infrastructure beyond cooperative jurisdictions, and impose costs on criminal organizations that currently treat American indictments and sanctions as background noise. Used carefully, it could protect victims and disrupt organizations that have learned to exploit the seams among national legal systems.

But the distinction between using private capability and privatizing state power will depend entirely on the institutions built around the program. A tightly constrained system with independent oversight, clear statutory limits, transparent metrics, aggressive protection against conflicts of interest, and meaningful accountability could remain recognizably public in character even when private firms execute the technical work.

A secretive contracting ecosystem dominated by a handful of favored firms would be something else entirely.

The White House memorandum therefore deserves attention not merely because it permits companies to hack foreign criminals. The novelty lies in the political economy it may create. Offensive cyber power is about to acquire contractors, procurement officers, compliance departments, preferred vendors, lobbying interests, insurance products, recruitment pipelines, classified facilities, proprietary tooling, and quarterly revenue.

That infrastructure will acquire momentum of its own.

The most important questions raised by the policy are consequently not the ones cybersecurity debates usually ask. They are not primarily about whether an exploit will work, whether a server can be disabled, or whether a criminal network can be mapped. American companies already possess extraordinary technical capabilities. The difficult questions concern authority: who decides which companies may use those capabilities, who determines the targets, who profits, who accepts the risk, who answers for mistakes, and who retains the power to say that an operation should not occur at all.

The program may ultimately prove to be a necessary adaptation to an Internet in which sovereignty, crime, espionage, and private infrastructure have become almost impossible to disentangle. It may give the United States an effective means of striking organizations that have spent years exploiting the asymmetry between global networks and national jurisdictions. It may even establish a model in which private technical excellence can be used without surrendering public control.

Or it may create a class of corporations that possess extraordinary tools, privileged intelligence relationships, and a financial interest in the permanent expansion of offensive cyber activity.

Both futures are plausible.

The difference between them will not be determined by the sophistication of the malware, the brilliance of the operators, or the size of the government contracts. It will be determined by something much less exciting and much more important: whether the United States can build institutions capable of controlling a form of power precisely when that power becomes useful.

The White House has opened the door. The question now is not simply who will be permitted to walk through it, but what will exist on the other side once the doorway becomes permanent.

Jonathan Brown is a cybersecurity researcher and investigative journalist at bordercybergroup.com.

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