Obama Goes Ahead With NSA Internet-monitoring Program

Another Friday afternoon (in spirit!), another "Obama admin continues Bush admin-era 'national security' policy" story. This one is a mysterious NSA program called, ominously, "Einstein 3."

We are going to wait for someone smarter than us about cybersecurity and the intelligence community to explain it to us, before we try to explain it to you. But here is what the Post says.

Under a classified pilot program approved during the Bush administration, NSA data and hardware would be used to protect the networks of some civilian government agencies. Part of an initiative known as Einstein 3, the pilot called for telecommunications companies to route the Internet traffic of civilian government agencies through a monitoring box that would search for and block malicious computer codes.

AT&T, the world's largest telecommunications firm, was the Bush administration's choice to participate in the test, which has been delayed for months as the Obama administration determines what elements of the Bush plan to preserve, former government officials said. The pilot was to have been launched in February.

And it is basically another "the NSA promises not to break any laws despite having the ability, if not explicitly the authority, to do whatever the fuck they want" thing, we think.

Send an email to Alex Pareene, the author of this post, at Rot13.write(' nyrkc@tnjxre.pbz '); alexp@gawker.com.