Shorter Jay Rockefeller: “Y’know what? The internet isn’t regulated enough”.
That’s a link to the text of the Cybersecurity Act of 2009. Needless to say, when legislation starts with “to ensure the free flow of _______”, its actual function is to do the opposite. All I’d like to know is this: where the hell is this mythical rampage of organized, calculated cyber attacks that keeps getting breathlessly blathered about every few months? The type of attacks that get big enough to warrant news coverage always end up coming from some over-caffeinated superdork kid with too much time on his hands, not some deliberate cyberjihad cell or opposing state that’d actually know WTF they were doing.
Odds are, if this passes, with the ratio gap between cyberthreats as popularly portrayed & as they actually exist, that shiny new government cybersquad will end up defaulting into whatever role they feel serves the interests of “the people” — by which I mean people like this guy.
