NSA Disclosures Derail Cyber “Star Wars” Defense Strategy?

In today’s New York Times, David Sanger published an article that the damage caused by Edward Snowden’s disclosures of NSA surveillance might have killed what Sanger calls “the equivalent of a ‘Star Wars’ defense for America’s computer networks, designed to intercept cyber attacks before they could cripple power plants, banks or financial markets.” More specifically:

Under this proposal, the government would latch into the giant “data pipes” that feed the largest Internet service providers in the United States, companies like A.T.&T. and Verizon. The huge volume of traffic that runs through those pipes, particularly e-mails, would be scanned for signs of anything from computer servers known for attacks on the United States or for stealing information from American companies. Other “metadata” would be inspected for evidence of malicious software.

Whether this idea would have matured and proceeded without leaks about NSA surveillance is not clear because opposition within the US government existed:

Top officials of the Department of Homeland Security, which is responsible for domestic defense of the Internet, complained that N.S.A. monitoring would overly militarize America’s approach to defending the Internet, rather than making sure users took the primary responsibility for protecting their systems.

The deputy secretary of defense, Ashton B. Carter, described in speeches over the past year an alternative vision in which the government would step in to defend America’s networks only as a last line of defense. He compares the Pentagon’s proper role in defending cyberattacks to its “Noble Eagle” operation, in which it intercepts aircraft that appear threatening only after efforts by the airlines to identify the passengers and by the Transportation Safety Administration to search passengers and luggage have failed.

The disclosures about NSA surveillance and its scale have, however, altered the nature of discourse in Washington, D.C. about this debate on US cyber defense in ways that make progress in this area, for the near future, potentially very, very difficult.