WASHINGTON — Three of the nation’s largest Internet-service providers are cooperating with a new National Security Agency program to sift through the traffic of major defense contractors with the goal of blocking cyberattacks by foreign adversaries, senior defense and industry officials say.
The novel program, which began last month on a voluntary, trial basis, relies on sophisticated NSA data sets to identify malicious programs slipped into the vast stream of Internet data.
“We hope the . . . cyberpilot can be the beginning of something bigger,” Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn said at a global security conference in Paris on Thursday.
The prospect of an NSA role in the monitoring of Internet traffic already had raised concerns among privacy activists, and Lynn’s suggestion that the program might be extended threatened to raise the stakes further.
The Washington Post
