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.
Continued...