DHS' Einstein to Monitor You?

Investigative reporter and syndicated columnist Wayne Madsen, writing for the Online Journal, reported late today that the intrusion detection system called Einstein, which has been marketed as a system that will monitor federal networks for cyberattacks, actually will first monitor federal employees' and contractors' surfing habits and e-mails.

From the article:

Einstein is advertised as merely conducting traffic analysis within the dot gov and dot mil domains, including data packet lengths, protocols, source and destination IP addresses, source and destination ports, time stamp information, and autonomous system numbers. However, [Wayne Madsen Report] has learned that Einstein will also bore down into the text of email and analyze message content. In fact, most of the classified budget allotted to Einstein is being used for collecting information from the text of messages and not the header data.

Madsen runs the The Madsen Report Web site, which describes itself as an "online publication [that] tackles the 'politically incorrect' and 'politically embarrassing' stories and holds government officials accountable for their actions. This web site extends a warm open invitation to whistleblowers and leakers. Business as usual for the crooks and liars in Washington, DC, is over."