The secrecy surrounding the Bush administration’s updated National Cyber Security Initiative — designed to improve the government’s digital defenses and put forth an offensive information warfare doctrine — is endangering the deterrent value of the project and appears to be aimed chiefly at supporting spying operations abroad, a key U.S. Senate committee concludes in a new report. The Senate Armed Services Committee said a major thrust of the initiative was to inform our adversaries as to the range of potential consequences of a cyber attack on U.S. strategic or national assets. But so far only three of the 18 goals spelled out in the cyber initiative have been discussed publicly; the rest remain classified. “It is difficult to conceive how the United States could promulgate a meaningful deterrence doctrine if every aspect of our capabilities and operational concepts is classified,” the committee’s report said. “In the era of superpower nuclear