Government NSA Taking Constructive Step Forward
The United States federal National Security Agency has been developing and confirmed a platform designed to protect the United States infrastructure. The platform, named Perfect Citizen, exists in order to protect the computer infrastructure and “depends on sensors placed within networks for vital environments and infrastructures that would be set off whenever there is an alarm of activity of a suspicious nature.”
The Raytheon Corp. was awarded the one hundred million contract of Perfect Citizen, and is supported by the monetary funds of the Comprehensive National Cyber Security Initiative. The national security agency has stated the Perfect Citizen program will not monitor network traffic within the nation's vital infrastructure networks. Instead Perfect Citizen “is a vulnerabilities analysis and capabilities development contract.” The National Security Agency also states “This is purely an effort and project involving a huge amount of engineering as well as research. There is no monitoring within this project, and no sensors of any type are utilized in this undertaking.”
While many individuals may think and feel a program of this measure may invade upon their privacy rights, the nation's infrastructure requires a strong protective measure in order to protect and strengthen our borders and internal information technology systems from external exploitations. The National Security Agency further stated, “the project presents technical answers that wil assist the National Security Agency gain a higher grasp of the many possibilities of threats to national security networks, which is a highly important piece of the National Security Agency's model of keeping the nation safe.Thoughts or ideas that there are illegal activities related with this project are completely false.”
The Perfect Citizen program was solely created to monitor and detect cyber attacks that may occur against the assets of the government or entities existing in the public or private sector including the nation's water treatment plants and power companies, entities that are highly critical to the continued service they provide. While these type of controls may engender the usual conspiracy theories, imagine the consequences of attacks against these vital resources.
The Wall Street Journal, which had printed a report about Perfect Citizen, explained the main thrust of the program. “The Perfect Citizen project will investigate larger, aged computer systems that were created and deployed without security measures or the use of the Internet in thought. A great deal of those systems, which execute and operate many processes from air traffic control to subway systems as an example, have been connected to the Internet, lending more effeciency while also placing them in a position of cyber attack.”
In addition to observing network activity and specifying the various cyber attacks that can occur against the government as well as our critical infrastructure, the Perfect Citizen platform will give great advantages for the private sector that is not being currently monitored. In this fashion, the National Security Agency will have the ability to gather intelligence of the operations and strategies of the various cyber attacks and share that information among the various networks and computer security concerns.
This type of protection is long overdue and the National Security Agency is the government entity that should carry forth this type of endeavor. As the citizens of the United States do not realize the Patriot Act removed some of their privacy rights, the Private Citizen platform is a safeguard against much worse circumstances and hopefully is the beginning of a greater collaboration between the federal government, the public sector, and private sector, in creating the strongest defense possible against cyber attacks from external forces.
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