The conceptual problem is that there are people running this program who don't understand how citizens feel about privacy in cyberspace. The Government has been discussing the proposal widely with a number of industry security committees and associations in recent months. Several industry executives said there is still reluctance on the part of industry to directly share information on computer intrusions with law enforcement. One potential problem in carrying out the Government's plan is that intrusion-detection software technology is still immature, industry executives said. Park, Calif., and a pioneer in the field of intrusion detection systems.
Current systems tend to generate false alarms and thus require many skilled operators.
Like telephone wiretaps, such tools can be used to reconstruct the activities of a computer user as if a videotape were made of his computer display. At the same time, however, the software tools are routinely misused by illicit computer network users in stealing information such as passwords or other data. Commercial vendors are beginning to sell monitoring tools that combine packet filtering with more sophisticated and automated intrusion detection software that tries to detect abuse by looking for behavior patterns or certain sequences of commands.