dog with night walking problems and fear of passing strangers

Hello everyone, I just joined the forum and I was wondering if anyone would have any ideas on some things I could do to help my dog out with his distrust of people, mostly night. My dog is an aussie, husky and lab mix and is about 7 months old, besides his occasional distrust he is very social and well behaved in general. I started noticing that he becomes extra protective and vigilant more in the night than in the day, I am also thinking that it may be he can't see very well at night or something. He will growl or whisper bark at the faintest noise and become defensive in posture when he spies someone coming from a quarter mile away. When we are in the woods at night he barks at the slightest noise. I also have a problem (at night and in day) with him wanting to inspect everything or one we pass, he won't just carry on and ignore it, especially at night; he will keep pulling to get at the person and they usually walk more quickly away. He has never bitten or tried to bite anyone, and if i let him go up to the person he will just sniff them but still look scary. I guess my ideal solution would be that i could say something like :"easy" to let him know to leave it alone and assume normal stance, and that I will take care of it. I have tried a command such as sit as a distraction but he doesn't pay attention at all in those instances. Also if he sees people he doesn't know in the house he wont calm down until I (at the least) go up to them and touch them. Just wondering how i could train that, or anything else that could help? could something like an "easy" command also be applied when i don't want him to bark at passerby or other things? thanks, so much in advance and I'm sorry if my post was a bit disjointed.