Want some scary reading to keep you up at night? Forget anything by Stephen King or Dean Koontz. All you have to do is open the 1/21/08 issue of The New Yorker and take a gander at Lawrence Wright's "The Spymaster." The story is a profile of Mike McConnell, the new Director of National Intelligence.
Do you use the Internet at all? Chew on this:
To McConnell's (very small) credit, he knows that getting a permanent government tap on the Internet will not be easy. "This is going to be a goat rope on the Hill," he admits. "My prediction is that we're going to screw around with this until something horrendous happens."
Think about that for a moment. McConnell is actually looking forward to another 9/11-style attack. Once that happens, he apparently hopes the American public will be terrorized into accepting the perversion of our nation from a bastion of free expression into a repressive surveillance state. In this new Oceania, everything you say will be monitored and God help you if you say the "wrong" thing.
Do we feel safer yet?
Do you use the Internet at all? Chew on this:
In order for cyberspace to be policed, Internet activity will have to be closely monitored. Ed Giorgio, who is working with McConnell on the plan, said that would mean giving government the authority to examine the content of any e-mail, file transfer, or Web search. "Google has records that could help in a cyber-investigation," he said. Giorgio warned me, "We have a saying in this business: 'Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.'"That's right - it doesn't matter what you do on a computer, Uncle Sam is demanding the power to look over your shoulder permanently in the name of security. "Americans will have to trust the government not to abuse the authority it must have in order to protect our networks," Wright notes somewhat dryly, "and yet, historically, the government has not proved worthy of that trust."
To McConnell's (very small) credit, he knows that getting a permanent government tap on the Internet will not be easy. "This is going to be a goat rope on the Hill," he admits. "My prediction is that we're going to screw around with this until something horrendous happens."
Think about that for a moment. McConnell is actually looking forward to another 9/11-style attack. Once that happens, he apparently hopes the American public will be terrorized into accepting the perversion of our nation from a bastion of free expression into a repressive surveillance state. In this new Oceania, everything you say will be monitored and God help you if you say the "wrong" thing.
Do we feel safer yet?
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