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Monday, June 21, 2010

Chi-Com admirer Joe Lieberman wants control over the Internet

From:
Kill the ‘Kill Switch’

Joe Lieberman: China can shut down the Internet, why can't we?
(AntiWar.com) -- by Justin Raimondo --

Who else but Joe Lieberman would introduce a bill to give the President the power to shut down the Internet with the flick of a switch? I’m afraid of the answer to that question, and you should be, too. However, it’s hardly surprising America’s premier authoritarian warmonger – author of a bill that would strip American citizenship from anyone even vaguely suspected of “terrorism” – would come up with a scheme like this.

If the “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act” passes – and isn’t that a name that embraces practically every collectivist bromide extant? – the Department of Homeland Security would establish a “cyber-terrorism” sub-bureaucracy, the Office of Cyberspace Policy (OCP), and the National Center for Cybersecurity and Communication (NCCC), with the former lording it over the Internet – a Cyber-Czar – and the latter unleashed to spy on and otherwise guard the “cybersecurity” Senators Lieberman and his two co-sponsors aver is imminently threatened.

This bill is the culmination of years of yelping about the likelihood of a “cyber-9/11,” a devastating attack on the national infrastructure via the Internet. If such an event is so likely, then why hasn’t it happened already? Because the likelihood of it ever happening is nearly nil.

In short, this is a completely phony and for all intents and purposes nonexistent “threat” that has been invented by those most likely to profit – financially and politically – from this kind of hype: the “cybersecurity” industry, which has been thriving (mostly off of government contracts, naturally) since 9/11, and neoconservative authoritarians of a Liebermanesque frame of mind. In their 2003 opus, An End to Evil, neocons Richard Perle and David Frum argue that what’s needed is a “domestic intelligence agency” to spy on Americans, and the Internet plays a major role in their scenario: Perle and Frum advocate establishing an Orwellian government database and comprehensive electronic surveillance system that not only keeps constant track of the whereabouts of everyone in the country, but also stores a dossier, complete with their religious and political affiliations – surely a job for the OCP/NCCC. After all, if we’re going to track the “cyber-terrorists,” we have to know who and where they are. Lieberman’s Cyber-Czar, and his minions, would put flesh on the bones of this nightmare, and make the neocon dream of a police state an emerging reality...MORE...LINK

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