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NSA Director Wants Threat Data Sharing With Private Sector
Trailrunner7 writes "While Congress and the technology community are still debating and discussing the intelligence gathering capabilities of NSA revealed in recent months, the agency's director, Gen. Keith Alexander, is not just defending the use of these existing tools, but is pitching the idea of sharing some of the vast amounts of threat and vulnerability data the NSA and other agencies possess with organizations in the private sector. Speaking at a time of great scrutiny of the agency and its activities, Alexander said that the NSA, along with other federal agencies such as the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and CIA, need to find a way to share the attack and vulnerability information they collect in order to help key private organizations react to emerging threats. Though the idea is still in its formative stages, Alexander said that it potentially could include companies in foreign countries, as well. 'We need the authority for us to share with them and them to share with us. But because some of that information is classified, we need a way to protect it,' Alexander said during a keynote speech at the Billington Cybersecurity Summit here Wednesday. 'Right now, we can't see what's happening in real time. We've got to share it with them, and potentially with other countries.'"
Is this guy for real? He's talking about real-time information sharing, obviously with no judicial oversight of any sort, rubber-stamped or otherwise.
FTFA: “Right now, we can’t see what’s happening in real time. We’ve got to share it with them, and potentially with other countries.”
Speaking to a crowd of mainly industry and government workers, Alexander appealed to them to help support the information sharing concept and any legislation that may be required to implement it.
How the hell is this not industrial espionage? And then you expect me to host my backups in a US-based cloud or use US-based services like Office365? Apparantly these NSA-approved encryption techniques dont work so good when you're trying to shield from the NSA.
How about this cloud-based electronic laboratory-notebook software that is being pitched to pharma companies. These contain all the sensitive data before the patents are filed. Will that data be "shared" with my competition as well?
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
And the descent into fascism is complete.
The police have automatic weapons and battle-armour. How exactly, will private organisations, who already give all their customer data to the NSA, control terrorist threats? Thirteen years ago the US government socialized security services to make the country 'safe'. But now the NSA wants to privatize intelligence services! Three months ago they wanted to sack (IT support) contractors in the interests of national 'security'.
In Australia, a major rigged-games scandal has appeared. So sporting clubs are demanding access to intelligence from the federal police (US-ians think FBI).
Its not like the NSA doesn't have past form on passing industrial espionage on european companies to American ones...