eweek.co 01.13.2013
The National Security Agency releases documents about the program to help secure critical infrastructure, but significant redactions leave questions over whether the agency will monitor private networks.
More than 30 months after the disclosure of a government program to help secure critical infrastructure, digital rights groups continue to have questions about whether the intent of the system is to monitor private networks. On Jan. 2 the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) published 190 pages of documents released by the National Security Agency under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The documents confirm key details of the program, known as PerfectCitizen, which was revealed by The Wall Street Journal in an article published in July 2010. The project, for example, includes a major effort to find and remediate vulnerabilities in sensitive control systems (SCS). Technology giant Raytheon received the contract for the program valued at approximately $100 million. Yet the redacted sections of the documents continue to raise questions. The NSA whited out key parts of three of the five technical requirements that set the scope of the program. In a list of the skills needed by specialized software engineers for PerfectCitizen, many of the descriptions requested by the NSA are similarly redacted.There is something going on here, and we need more information to confirm the extent of this program," said Jeramie Scott, National Security Fellow with the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), which filed the FOIA request for the documents
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