Just a week after the Defense Department announced plans to put the National Security Agency in charge of military cyber defense and attack, the agency’s reach has already expanded to include monitoring of government civilian networks.
Given the NSA’s involvement in the Bush administration’s warrantless eavesdropping program, critics are concerned that the monitoring of government traffic on private-sector telecommunication networks that are used by the general public would allow the agency to once again spy on large swaths of non-government traffic without a warrant.