NSA May Be 'Traffic Cop' for U.S. Networks

[Rose Siding]

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration is considering making the National Security Agency -- famous for eavesdropping and code breaking -- its "traffic cop" for ambitious plans to share homeland security information across government computer networks, a senior NSA official says.

Such a decision would expand NSA's responsibility to help defend the complex network of data pipelines carrying warnings and other sensitive information. It would also require significantly more money for the ultra-secret spy agency.

The NSA's director for information assurance, Daniel G. Wolf, was expected to outline his agency's potential role during a speech Wednesday at the RSA technology conference in San Francisco. In an interview preceding his speech, Wolf told The Associated Press that computer networks at U.S. organizations are like medieval castles, each protected by different-size walls and moats.
...
"If someone isn't working on being a traffic cop, giving guidance on how secure they need to be, a risk that is taken by one castle is really shared by other castles," Wolf said. "Who's defining the standards? Who says how high the walls should be?"

http://www.newsday.com/news/politics/wire/sns-ap-computer-security,0,5186000.story?coll=sns-ap-politics-headlines

[Alpharetta]

1. NSA will "insource" it to ChoicePoint contractors

just a guess. :)

[soothsayer]

2. And I remember when the gov't denied that NSA existed. sigh

And langley was supposedly a national transportation headquarters or something.

Those were the days!

[Psephos]

3. It was just a few years ago that the Echelon project was denied, too n/t

[UL_Approved]

4. Start to study cryptography

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