The Bush administration planned last year to direct the National Security Agency, which specializes in spying electronically on foreign adversaries, to take the techniques it has employed to defend military computer networks and use them to protect U.S. government civilian networks, according to current and former officials.
When the effort did not proceed as quickly as hoped, NSA employees on loan to the Department of Homeland Security sought to test sophisticated software that would send sensor technologies into the Internet to detect malicious code entering civilian government networks, the officials said.
