Several cybersecurity initiatives lost after Snowden's NSA leaks

As Edward Snowden was preparing to disclose classified documents he had purloined from National Security Agency computers in Hawaii, the NSA director, Gen Keith Alexander, was gearing up to sell Congress and the public on a proposal for the NSA to defend private US computer networks against cyberattacks. Gen Alexander wanted to use the NSA's powerful tools to scan Internet traffic for malicious software code. He said the NSA could kill the viruses and other digital threats without reading consumers' private emails, texts and Web searches. But after Snowden began leaking NSA systems for spying in cyberspace that went public in June, Alexander's proposal was a political nonstarter, felled by distrust of his agency's fearsome surveillance powers in the seesawing national debate over privacy and national security. It was one of several Obama Administration initiatives, in Congress and in diplomacy, that experts say have been stopped cold or set back by the Snowden affair. As a result, US officials have struggled to respond to the daily onslaught of attacks from Russia, China and elsewhere, a vulnerability that US intelligence agencies now rank as a greater threat to national security than terrorism.