A report in this week’s Washington Post said that plans are to move ahead with a plan to screen government traffic on private networks. AT&T will serve as a test site, and the NSA will assist in the plan. According to the White House, the system is being used to protect computer systems from attack, a particularly important area given recent high-profile attacks and the widely publicized need for government attention to cyber-security. There’s no question that government computers need to be more secure than they are now. The questions now are, will this new move help, and does it move too far into the area of intrusion into the activities of private citizens?

The latter question is especially relevant in the post-Bush era, when warrantless wiretapping was the order of the day, and the administration then was operating under the misguided strategy of “anything for the sake of national security.” Perhaps being aware of past oversteps from the previous administration, President Obama did make it a point to say that the system is meant to protect computer systems from attack, and would not involve monitoring any private sector networks or traffic. DHS officials also noted that the program will only look at data that moves to or from government systems.

Assuming that is the case then, the program, dubbed “Einstein 3″, is legitimate and does not infringe on any civil liberties or privacy rights. In fact, it is doing only what security experts have advised private companies to do for years–monitor traffic for the presence of malware, to guard against attackers, and to prevent “data leakage” and the illicit transmission of information from within the network. The plan would screen traffic whenever a citizen sent an email to a government address, and that in itself rightly causes the ears of civil libertarians to perk up–although it must be understood that this takes place in almost every private company every day already.

The plan calls on telcos to route traffic from civilian agencies through a monitoring system that checks for attempts to penetrate or compromise the network. While this is nothing more than security best practice, it is important to be watchful of the NSA’s participation to ensure that they don’t overstep their bounds and use it as an excuse for spying on private citizens.

The program, part of the Bush-era cybersecurity initiative, is said to be essential in an era where government systems have been compromised before. It should be noted here that the program does not include Bush-era attempts to pass through a tactic that would intercept the general public’s email and phone calls without a warrant; the current iteration of Einstein 3 is focusing on protecting the network from attack only. Assuming that privacy is protected in the procss, the plan should move ahead.