Government Wants to Monitor Networks of All Critical Infrastructure Providers
May 28th, 2010Oh sure.
Via: Wired:
Companies that operate critical infrastructures and do not voluntarily allow the federal government to install monitoring software on their networks to detect possible cyberattacks would face the “wild” internet on their own and place us all at risk, a top Pentagon official seemed to say Wednesday.
Defense Deputy Secretary William Lynn III, speaking at the Strategic Command Cyber Symposium in Nebraska, said we need to think imaginatively about how to use the National Security Agency’s Einstein monitoring systems on critical private-sector networks — such as those in the financial, utility and communication industries — in order to protect us.
“Operators of critical infrastructure could opt in to a government-sponsored security regime,” Lynn said. Otherwise, “individual users who do not want to enroll could stay in the wild wild west of the unprotected internet.”
Failure to protect the power grids, transportation system, or financial sector, he said, “could lead to physical damage and economic disruption on a massive scale.”
Privacy and civil liberties groups, however, have raised concerns about the Einstein systems with regard to what information they would collect and share with the government and what oversight, if any, would be put in place to ensure that federal privacy and wiretapping laws are not violated.
The Einstein programs are intrusion-detection and response systems developed by the National Security Agency. The government is in the process of deploying Einstein 2 to federal networks to inspect traffic for malicious threats, but there has been talk of deploying it to private-sector networks as well. Intrusion-detection systems are already a standard tool in the defense arsenal of private-sector businesses, and the government has been unclear about how its system surpasses those already available to companies.
Coming up next: Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, Twitter declared Critical Infrastructure.