Joe Lieberman's CyberSecurity Bill – A Land Grab?

The President’s recent commencement address to Hampton University students in Virginia counseled the young minds about the dangers of being bombarded by too much information, but who knew that Joe Lieberman was listening when the President said:

Meanwhile, you’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t rank all that high on the truth meter. With iPods and iPads; Xboxes and PlayStations; information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment. All of this is not only putting new pressures on you; it is putting new pressures on our country and on our democracy.

The President also schooled the kids on how difficult it is to sift through all of the information on the web. Perhaps he thinks the government should help us by winnowing out some of the inconsequential information?

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All of that mind-boggling information and the new pressures on our country and our democracy must have triggered a response in this “independent senator” from Connecticut (who caucuses with the Democrats of course, just like the other “independent senator,” Bernie Sanders of Vermont), as Joe Lieberman has offered legislation that he claims will “protect” America during an emergency by giving the President power to shut down the Internet.

Lieberman’s bill, titled, The Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act or PCNAA, is a terrifying piece of law for any real lover of free speech as it offers the President almost limitless power over the web with the ability to renew itself indefinitely. You have to wonder where the MSM and the ACLU are on this one? The silence is deafing.

A staunch supporter of this bill is W.V. Senator Jay Rockefeller, who just last year during Congressional hearings about cyber-security was heard bemoaning the invention of the Internet, asking “Would it had been better if we’d have never invented the Internet?”

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In my own experience, it was the Internet that allowed me to communicate with my wife when the phone systems in Manhattan were crippled by the 9/11 attack. Although we were less than five miles away from each other, normal telephone service was crippled by the collapse of the World Trade Center towers onto a Verizon switching station, but access to email and instant messaging allowed us to stay in contact. You might expect that a situation like 9/11 would be one of the first to trigger a government controlled shutdown of the web, but precisely the opposite happened.

By most accounts it was the broad reach of the Internet that got Obama elected and also raised much of the money needed to do so. Shutting down the greatest free speech tool in the history of man, or giving control of this tool to one person or one party is a dangerous proposition indeed. And if you need proof, you only need to look back a year.

It was just over a year ago that Iran’s post-election protests were going viral on the web. A government imposed news blackout after the rigged re-election of Ahmadinejad was not enough. You could keep the foreign journalists out of the country and shut down the telephones, but the web was another thing. CNN, FOX, MSNBC all gathered news on this growing revolt via the web. Through Twitter and some limited cell phone videos we learned of the massive protests, the Iranian military pushing back, arresting and killing those who dared to gather peacefully and question the election results.

We must remember that it was the Internet and social networks like Twitter, the delivered the images of Iran’s Neda Soltan’s death at the hands of Iran’s Basij, the plain-clothed thugs who used snipers on buildings, and motorcycle-riding gangs swinging axes and hammers to disperse the protestors. The world witnessed this horror and learned the truth about Iran’s government because of the Internet.

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The instances of web control in countries with less freedom than America are myriad. Just googling the phrase “China blocks Google” yields over one million items on the topic, some as old as 2002 and as recent as March 2010. And the Chinese government is not just protecting the people from porn purveyors — apparently they want the truth merchants to be blocked as well. For the record, if you google Tiananmen Square killings in China, you will discover that the incident (and the estimated killing of 3,000 protestors) never happened.

North Korea is a great example of how government control of media, under the guise of protecting its citizens a repressive regime can starve the people of accurate and honest information. But this is not just about a single country. Consider access to the web as something that could be used as a tool by several countries to control their people. Allies can band together in blocking the truth from the masses as they see fit. Control the message, control the people.

We have not even discussed the additional layers of government that will be added once this bill is passed. In a time of already bloated government weighed down by crushing costs, by all estimates at least two new government agencies will be needed to support this initiative.

The power of the Internet is not to be denied. Is it perfect? Hardly, but the web is an amazing tool that will not grow, develop and progress under the threat of a government takeover. Why would anything company or industry invest in R&D with the knowledge that at any time it could be seen as a threat to the current order?

So whether we are discussing FCC Chairman Genachowski’s efforts in to impose his/Obama’s vision of how the Internet should operate or Joe Lieberman, DHS and Congress’s handing the president the kill switch under the guise of “keeping us safe and secure,” we all should be asking the MSM where they stand on this. . . while we still can ask.