Early last year, as Edward Snowden was preparing to disclose classified
documents he had purloined from National Security Agency computers in
Hawaii, the NSA director, Gen. Keith Alexander, was gearing up to sell
Congress and the public on a proposal for the NSA to defend private U.S.
computer networks against cyber attacks.
Alexander wanted to use the NSA's powerful tools to scan Internet traffic for malicious software code. He said the NSA could kill the viruses and other digital threats without reading consumers' private emails, texts and Web searches.
The NSA normally protects military and other national security computer networks. Alexander also wanted authority to prevent hackers from penetrating U.S. banks, defense industries, telecommunications systems and other institutions to crash their networks or to steal intellectual property worth billions of dollars.
But after Snowden, a contractor, began leaking NSA systems for spying in cyberspace that went public in June, Alexander's proposal was a political nonstarter, felled by distrust of his agency's fearsome surveillance powers in the seesawing national debate over privacy and national security.
It was one of several Obama administration initiatives, in Congress and in diplomacy, that experts say have been stopped cold or set back by the Snowden affair. As a result, U.S. officials have struggled to respond to the daily onslaught of attacks from Russia, China and elsewhere, a vulnerability that U.S. intelligence agencies now rank as a greater threat to national security than terrorism.
“All the things [the NSA] wanted to do are now radioactive, even though they were good ideas,” said James Lewis, a cyber security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington.
Read more: Several cyber security initiatives lost after Snowden's NSA leaks - latimes.com
Alexander wanted to use the NSA's powerful tools to scan Internet traffic for malicious software code. He said the NSA could kill the viruses and other digital threats without reading consumers' private emails, texts and Web searches.
The NSA normally protects military and other national security computer networks. Alexander also wanted authority to prevent hackers from penetrating U.S. banks, defense industries, telecommunications systems and other institutions to crash their networks or to steal intellectual property worth billions of dollars.
But after Snowden, a contractor, began leaking NSA systems for spying in cyberspace that went public in June, Alexander's proposal was a political nonstarter, felled by distrust of his agency's fearsome surveillance powers in the seesawing national debate over privacy and national security.
It was one of several Obama administration initiatives, in Congress and in diplomacy, that experts say have been stopped cold or set back by the Snowden affair. As a result, U.S. officials have struggled to respond to the daily onslaught of attacks from Russia, China and elsewhere, a vulnerability that U.S. intelligence agencies now rank as a greater threat to national security than terrorism.
“All the things [the NSA] wanted to do are now radioactive, even though they were good ideas,” said James Lewis, a cyber security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington.
Note EU-Digest: this sounds like a somewhat weak excuse. It should be quite clear that if the NSA is or was working on programs to protect the public from Chinese, Russian prying eyes and ears or malware or identity thief's, there is nothing to stop them from doing that. When their work starts to involve breaching US and EU citizen's privacy rights - that is another question.
Read more: Several cyber security initiatives lost after Snowden's NSA leaks - latimes.com
No comments:
Post a Comment