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A representative for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has denied a report that the U.S. government plans to release a proposal requiring ISPs to help build a centralized system designed to monitor Internet use.

The denial came after the New York Times reported in its online edition on Friday that a final version of the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace report, due out early next year, calls for the creation of a centralized Net monitoring system.

Mixed Reports

"The story is wrong. There is no such proposal under consideration," said Brian Roehrkasse, a Homeland Security spokesperson.

The final report is being prepared by the President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board. The board released a draft of the report in September. It has been posted for public input on the White House site. Comment has also been solicited at town meetings around the country.

Despite the government's claims that it has no plans to monitor Internet use, Stewart Baker, a partner with Washington, D.C.-based law firm Steptoe & Johnson LLP, who represents a group of ISPs, said Friday that his clients have seen a version of the report that includes a Net monitoring system.

"This struck us as a bad enough idea that we should talk about it," Baker said in an interview.

Cybersecurity Evaluated

Although Baker has not seen the report himself, he said that his clients have seen a draft of the plan that calls for a consolidated version of ISPs' network monitoring centers, which allow ISPs to look at activity on their networks, down to the content being accessed by a particular user.

If the government creates such a system, this type of surveillance could be interpreted as a wiretap and could have serious privacy ramifications, Baker said.

"If the government sits alongside the people [in the monitoring center] and looks at content, it's clearly engaged in a wiretap," Baker said.

However, a source familiar with the private sectors' involvement in the strategy said Friday that he had not seen any proposals to create a central monitoring system for the Internet. The source, who did not want to be named, said that the only similar proposal he saw was a plan to have private and public sector warning systems communicate with one another.

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