The cyber "shield" in the making

WSJ story on planned federal government initiative "Perfect Citizen" to detect cyber assaults on private companies and gov agencies running critical infrastructure.  Naturally, it will be a vast and expanding program--a la the WAPO series by Priest and Arkin.

The surveillance by the National Security Agency, the government's chief eavesdropping agency, would rely on a set of sensors deployed in computer networks for critical infrastructure that would be triggered by unusual activity suggesting an impending cyber attack, though it wouldn't persistently monitor the whole system, these people said.

Defense contractor Raytheon Corp. recently won a classified contract for the initial phase of the surveillance effort valued at up to $100 million, said a person familiar with the project.

An NSA spokeswoman said the agency had no information to provide on the program. A Raytheon spokesman declined to comment.

Some industry and government officials familiar with the program see Perfect Citizen as an intrusion by the NSA into domestic affairs, while others say it is an important program to combat an emerging security threat that only the NSA is equipped to provide.

Hard to argue against some government effort to surveil the critical infrastructure domain, and hard not to see the effort stay fairly secret, because as I learned with Y2K, the critical infrastructure industry isn't exactly interested in advertising its vulnerabilities.