Some guy yelled at me about this today. People seem to yell a great many political things at me lately. Frankly, it's all quite tiring. Anyhow, this doofus went of on an unsolicited rant about how President Obama was going to "shut off the internet at will."

Man, I thought, I gotta know how he can do that. So, I googled (is that a verb now?) "Obama shut down internet," and I was led to the documents for the Cybersecurity Act of 2009. The actual bills are S. 773 and 778. The first draft is here [pdf].

I skimmed through it and found that it echoed almost everything I'd heard about last year's CSIS report. Basically, the report acknowledged a few things that should have already been glaringly obvious:

That our government's computer infrastructure is vulnerable to attack and disruption,
That you can trust Congress, who are experts on these things, to throw tons of money at it if you like, and
It won't do much good.

So, in the interest of doing something, Congress came up with S. 773. It's a really professional-looking, well-organized proposal that's basically full of hot air. And it's expensive hot air, too.

Still, I didn't see anything sinister until I neared the end. There's some boilerplate about funding, qualifications and clearance for Federal I.T. contractors, and a program of "challenges" to incite students into becoming code monkeys for The Man.

This week, the Supreme Court handed down their decision in Arizona v. Johnson [pdf]. This case expands on the powers of police to detain and search citizens given only the vague qualifier of "reasonable suspicion."

Granted, the courts have upheld the idea that our rights to privacy are significantly reduced when in an automobile, but this case expands the rights of arbitrary search and seizure of uninvolved passengers somewhat.

At this point, an officer can order me out of my car and search me on nothing more than a hunch.