Source: Raw Story

The Obama administration is going ahead with a controversial plan to have the National Security Agency screen government email and other official computer traffic passing over private networks.

The plan is part of a cybersecurity initiative launched by the Bush administration in 2008 and known as Einstein 3. The purpose of the program is to protect government computer systems from attack, and the Department of Homeland Security insists that only data going in and out of government systems will be subject to special screening for malicious code.

Tests of the effectiveness of the program — which is derived from one used on military networks — were to have begun in February but have been delayed by debates within the Obama administration. Both the military origin of the system and the involvement of the NSA have aroused concerns about privacy.

President Obama promised in May that there would be no intrusion on private communications, and the administration has indicated its intention to consult with privacy and civil liberaties groups on an ongoing basis.

Ari Schwartz, a vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, told the Associated Press, “There are a number of concerns that come with this process, the main one being how do you go about protecting the system in a way that insures you’re not monitoring private systems. I don’t have a full answer to that question. But the president made that pledge.”

Despite these assurances, it is not clear whether non-governmental data can be kept out of the monitoring system, and the plan has critics even within DHS. Former assistant secretary of homeland security Stewart A. Baker told the Washington Post, “The bitter battles over privacy and NSA’s role in domestic wiretapping hang over cybersecurity like a toxic cloud.”

Baker, who served as NSA general counsel during the Clinton administration, also suggested that the Bush administration should be held responsible for creating many of the current problems by trying to keep so much of Einstein 3 secret.

“The solution was veiled in secrecy in a way that allowed people outside to be suspicious,” he explained, “so anybody who mistrusted the intelligence community could just assume that it was because they were doing something that they shouldn’t be doing.”