Media News - Monday, July 06, 2009

US government Internet traffic to be screened: report

The Obama administration is planning to use the National Security Agency to screen Internet traffic between government agencies and the private sector, the Washington Post reported Friday. The project was first initiated by the previous administration of president George W. Bush and was due to be set in motion in February. The aim is to protect the government computer network from attacks from outside, the Post said quoting Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. Her department has been tasked with guiding the NSA in the fight against cyberterrorism, she said. The plans risk re-igniting the fierce debate here about the protection of civil liberties, with the Bush administration accused of having tightened controls on telecommunications and Internet networks. In the Bush-era, the NSA was given the task of carrying out unauthorized wire taps on telephone calls between the United States and abroad. But Napolitano said the NSA would only be charged with looking at data going to or from the government system. 'Each time a private citizen visited a 'dot.gov' website or sent an email to a civilian government employees, that action would be screened for potential harm to the network,' the Post wrote. The daily quoted a Bush administration official as saying the program would focus on malicious content potentially in any note sent to a government address. 'What we're interested in is finding the code, the thing that will do the network harm, not reading the email itself,' they said. (AFP)

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