WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency secretly planned a cyberwarfare program that could fire back automatically at cyberattacks from foreign countries without any human involvement, creating the risk of accidentally starting a war, according to a new report based on interviews with former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
The program, codenamed MonsterMind, would have let the military agency automate the process of “hunting for the beginnings” of a foreign cyberattack, the report said. The software would be constantly on the lookout for digital “traffic patterns” that indicated known or suspected attacks, the report published this week by Wired magazine said.
The report, part of a wide-ranging interview with Snowden in Moscow, described the MonsterMind program as “in the works.” Snowden told the magazine that a counter-attack could be leveled at an innocent party, largely because initial attacks often are routed or diverted through other countries.
“You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia. And then we end up shooting back at a Russian hospital,” Snowden said.
Snowden also called the program a major threat to privacy because NSA would first “have to secretly get access to virtually all private communications coming in from overseas to people in the U.S.,” said the new report, by NSA expert and author James Bamford.
The NSA declined to comment on specifics of the Wired report. A spokeswoman, Vanee Vines, instead said, “If Mr. Snowden wants to discuss his activities, that conversation should be held with the U.S. Department of Justice. He needs to return to the United States to face the charges against him.”
