Remember Senator “Shady” Joe Lieberman’s (I-Conn) Internet “Kill Switch” Bill? It appears that Lieberman and friends are preparing to trot out the unpopular bill for another attempt to initiate a government power grab.
To be fair, the “Independent” Lieberman isn’t the only one bringing us this awful legislation. Two other Senators: Susan Collins (R-Maine), and Tom Carper (D-Del), support this bill. This should prove to everyone that attempts at government power grabs in industries or goods are not confined to the ideas of single political parties like bloated talking heads would have you believe.
When it comes to acquiring a stranglehold on digital freedom, it’s all about the parties sticking together.
The bill is S.3480 and it’s called the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act. It has been a hot topic in technology media in the wake of the Egyptian revolution. It’s another in a long line of deliberately confusing and excessively long government documents. These things are designed to be so long and boring that most people will never even read them.
That’s a real problem that no one else reads these shady bills. Don’t people know that’s how they “run their pimp game” on us?
Now usually you have to sift through some boring and dry crap to get to the meaningful stuff when you’re looking at drafts of proposed government legislation. That’s not the case with this bill, sure its mostly useless, boring garbage. But I noticed something about this bill right away on the government’s official summary website that says a lot more than any modern day politician will.
“Amends the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (HSA) to establish within DHS a National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications (NCCC).”
The “Kill Switch” bill is going to be an extension of the same bill that gave us the creation of the despised Department of Homeland Security and that brought us the unpopular current Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano or “Big Sis”. The DHS is one of the main departments where the near unlimited authority of the Patriot Act is used most often without being questioned.
Yes Lieberman expects us to trust that his bill won’t lead to any wacky government hijinks even though it will only serve to legalize something the DHS has been doing anyways. The DHS is already seizing web domains within the US without any legitimate authority to do so. It has already seized the domains of people who link to copyrighted material via BitTorrent p2p site and links to streaming sports.
They’re busting people who merely link to other people who want to share these “illegal” materials, they are not engaged in the actual copying or streaming themselves. We are seeing a crackdown on people who merely want to share because they believe in sharing and because technology gives us the godlike ability to share anything we want with anyone, anywhere in the world.
The government they just want to make it legal before anyone can challenge them in court for committing unlawful seizures of property. They don’t want anyone to have a legal course to challenge their motivation for taking down someone’s website.
The bill would also create yet another government agency to deal with a problem we are all supposed to be so fearful of. Do we really need a National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications that is funded by taxpayer dollars? Doesn’t the government get enough cyber communications information from Google and Facebook?
Does it really seem just or fair for the government to go ahead and create another agency with an unlimited budget when spending is becoming a concern in Washington that even the craftiest pols can’t ignore?
Lieberman and his cosponsors claim that the bill won’t give “Kill Switch” control to the president even though the current wording basically allows him to name a domain as a threat to our safety and seize it a.s.a.p.
Lieberman promises that that’s not the intent of the bill and that they will take out any language that sounds like that to make sure we won’t have a situation like Egypt where the whole country was taken offline for their own “safety”.
Lieberman and company might reword the bill to sound more confusing, but I bet you he won’t take out the part where the president and his trusted cyber agents get to name which domain is a threat based on a set of very vague rules.
They can dress it up all they want, but until they get rid of it altogether, I’m convinced these guys want to hand over control of the Internet to the government.
