Democrats Don't Want to Make the Same Mistake as Ahmadinejad
August 29, 2009 by Dan Riggsby
Filed under Uncategorized
Apparently they don’t want people to use the internet, like the Iranian people did, to coordinate when they lock down the country. In the typical fashion of the Democratic Party, they will again attempt to control your speech. Why Americans think the Democratic Party is the party of free speech is beyond me.
The latest effort is the Cybersecurity Act of 2009. Here is an article that explains how the Democratic bill wants the President to have a “kill” switch for the Internet.
What is wrong with people? We still can’t import fine Cuban cigars because they are communist, but these idiots are doing there best to make Castro look like a libertarian, and people are still supporting them! These guys are dangerous!
And Hollywood, the “Free Speech Mecca” of the country is supporting this nonsense. Someone buy these people a history book. Wake up, it’s starting. Let’s stop it at the polling booths before it gets worse.
This is not an Obama, or even a Democrat thing. The idea of a top-down organization for things like emergency response and security is not even new to our generation. I think it started with the New Deal, and was cemented after WWII; we turned a corner and started thinking of federal government as “the government,” and thinking that all national threats and problems had Big Solutions. Now we have a centralized agribusiness system, an emergency management agency that is entirely national, a tendency to make every criminal or political situation a federal something-or-other, and so on. We’ve lost the libertarian ideals that kept things balanced and separated, and political power distributed. It has increased our magnitude as a nation, but has also created a lack of resilience that may come home to roost all too soon.
I think some things–like national defense and monetary policy–belong at the federal level. Others, like food supplies, emergency management, education, and most law enforcement, belong at the state level and below.
The Internet is designed to function without central control. Ironically, it was designed that way by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to survive a nuclear war. Strictly speaking (my IT geekism aura is now visible to the naked eye), TCP/IP is the Internet: the ‘Net is not a thing, it is a body of protocols that can be used to make a network of networks. No one owns the Internet, as such, although various public and private institutions operate the backbone servers and media that make up the current Internet. Since the architecture of the Internet is decentralized, it is arguably a brighter idea to decentralize the measures used to protect its infrastructure, its users, and so on.
Speaking of infrastructure, maybe we should back up a step and consider what we are really trying to protect. Setting aside the ominous growth of interest by our government in establishing itself as provider, protector, and controller, I will assume that the true objective is national security. Computer attackers thrive on challenges like a nationally controlled cybersecurity system. Terrorists or other enemies will likewise delight in the ability to concentrate their efforts on a single point that, WHEN it is defeated will yield maximum results and bring our nation to its knees. Rather than centralizing command and control of all of our critical systems, I suggest DARPA’s Internet might serve as a model for other aspects of our infrastructure. We should separate, uncouple, compartmentalize things such as food production, power production, fuel refinement, emergency preparedness, etc. and make it virtually impossible to strike as at the heart of a system.
I think we are right to be worried about the technical ineptitude of our government, and even more concerned with its interest in taking control of that which it does not understand. However, that tendency is not specific to technology. Our elected officials and most of their bureaucrats and advisors have little collective ability to manage power, food, or the economy in general. My technical suggestion specific to this “Kill Switch” is to give up on the idea of a single strongpoint and distribute those things we choose to protect. My political proposal is to return to the idea of a federation of states, and distribute the power and burden of government back to the states. The obvious similarity of the two models is no accident.
MK
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