According to a Thursday report in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), the National Security Agency (NSA) has confirmed that existence of its new program – codenamed “Perfect Citizen” – which will keep a check on critical infrastructure networks, public as well as private, so as to look for suspicious activity that might hint of any potential hacking attack.

Though NSA has rebuffed the assertions that the “Perfect Citizen” is a secret monitoring plan for which NSA will deploy sensors for detecting cyber attacks, the WSJ report says that NSA is working with Raytheon for the supposed sensor-based monitoring, to spy on US networks.

Quoting an internal Raytheon e-mail that said, “Perfect Citizen is Big Brother,” the WSJ report said that NSA and Raytheon are working out a system that will essentially “rely on a set of sensors deployed in computer networks for critical infrastructure that would be triggered by unusual activity suggesting an impending cyber attack.”

The “Perfect Citizen” program is being funded out of the Comprehensive National Security Initiative (CNSI) – an effort that was started by the Bush administration as a classified endeavor. The effort, which has been continued by the Obama administration, has recently declassified some general information about the program.

Going by the information revealed about the program, it seems to fit directly within the CNSI mandate, which, as per an earlier description by a DHS official, can be called a “Manhattan Project to defend cyber networks.”