To prevent future Eric Snowdens from leaking classified information to the media, the U.S. Army will soon begin monitoring the online behavior of its employees vis-à-vis tracking software.
The monitoring program will be built into a program referred to as “Army Network 2020,” an in-house computer network set to launch in seven years. It comes on the heels of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaking information that revealed the agency collects data on everyone from American citizens to world leaders.
The tracking portion of the network will be tasked with catching anyone who might download and distribute classified documents. Specifically, it will use “behavior-based analytics” to monitor the activity of soldiers, according to Maj. Gen. Alan Lynn, vice director of the Defense Information Systems Agency.
“It will follow your pattern and how you operate. If you go to X number of website, it logs it. If you put out so many emails, it logs it. If you now change your behavior and so something completely different, you go to a separate site or an inside site and you start downloading a whole lot of information,” the network will send a red flag to security personnel, he said.
The Army will also specially target employees who’ve just started or are otherwise about to leave their job, as both groups are seen as most likely to leak information.
The request for an internal tracking system dates back one year, when U.S. President Barack Obama issued a memo describing a program meant to “deter, detect, and mitigate actions by employees who may represent a threat to national security.”
Story via: nationaldefensemagazine.org
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