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The NSA's Cyber-Spies Have Their Eyes on Wall Street

Putting government snoops inside the New York Stock Exchange is going to be a tough sell.
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NSA Director General Keith Alexander is determined to lead the US safely into the cyberwar era, and that includes defending the nation’s wallet against would-be hackers.

The director wants to stretch the agency’s already sweeping program to monitor the nation’s computer networks in order to thwart incoming cyberattacks that could cripple the country’s financial sector. That means the government snoops’ next target could be Wall Street.

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"You have to have the rules set up so you can defend Wall Street," Alexander said at a public event in DC last night, Foreign Policy reported. He of course didn’t go into detail about what those “rules” would be, but the gist is that the agency would start monitoring real-time online communications and collect data from big banks and financial institutions.

While discussing surveillance at an interagency meeting this summer, Alexander said: “I can’t defend the country until I’m into all the networks,” officials told the New York Times.

What's more, whisperings in Washington over the last year suggest the agency's cyber-spies are fighting for the power to act offensively, not just on the defense, in the case of a cyberattack. The Times reported that the NSA "has lobbied inside the government to deploy the equivalent of a 'Star Wars' defense for America’s computer networks, designed to intercept cyberattacks before they could cripple power plants, banks or financial markets."

Alexander alluded to this offensive strategy too at yesterday's event. He said that if the NSA spots a potential threat—his example was "a cyberpacket that's about to destroy Wall Street"—the agency would need to be able to act fast to avoid a devastating attack. "Act" being the operative word.

It's not the first time the Defense Department has spoken out about its plans for economic cyberdefense. “It is not a secret that the Intelligence Community collects information about economic and financial matters," Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper said in a statement last month. "We collect this information for many important reasons: for one, it could provide the United States and our allies early warning of international financial crises which could negatively impact the global economy."

But putting government eyes and ears inside the New York Stock Exchange and JP Morgan Chase is going to be a tough sell. Indeed, in 2011 Alexander proposed monitoring banks' networks by installing surveillance equipment, but financial executives said they felt that would fall under the realm of unconstitutional warrantless surveillance. (And I’m sure that’s not the only reason they felt uneasy about the government monitoring their communications.)

Today, an attempt to ramp up surveillance in the middle of intense public backlash against America's Big Brother snooping is almost laughable. But then again, that's what we would have said about the government reading our emails and Facebook posts, too.