Big Brother moves in

— Last month, even as the president of the United States was forthrightly denouncing the Egyptian government for cutting off its citizens’ access to big parts of the Internet, his flunkies on Capitol Hill were preparing a bill that would allow Barack Obama to do exactly the same thing here.

Virtually at the same moment Obama was demanding that Egypt stop monkeying with Facebook and Twitter, Maine’s imitation-Republican Senator Susan Collins announced that she plans to reintroduce a bill that died in Congress last year.

Collins gave the bill a smiley-face name: the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act. Internet geeks, about the only people who’ve noticed what the government is up to, prefer to call it the Kill Switch Bill, because that’s what it would do: give the president the authority to turn off the Internet whenever he pleases.

The bill would give the president the right to declare “a national cyber emergency” and seize authority over any part of the Internet he decides is vital to the “economic security, public health or safety of the United States, any state, or any local government.” And just in case that’s not broad enough, the bill also allows him to snatch anything the White House deems “appropriate.”

But this is America, dammit, so the bill includes safeguards for our liberties. The president can only grab stuff for four months at a time. And while the bill says his designations of which parts of the Internet are “vital” are not subject to judicial review, he will have the advice of an enormous new cyberspace bureaucracy presided over by one of our most sensitive of civil-liberties agencies . . . the airport-gropers of Homeland Security.

The arguments in favor of the bill put forth by Collins’ allies were not entirely reassuring. A staffer on the Senate’s Homeland Security committee, for instance, said the bill was necessary in case the White House learned of a cyber attack on “the system that controls the floodgates to the Hoover Dam.”

That sounds reasonable, unless you know that (1) the Hoover Dam is operated by a government agency, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, so the White House doesn’t need any additional authority to protect it, and (2) the computers that control the dam’s floodgates aren’t connected to the Internet. Then it sounds like a power grab.

Even more ominous was an interview given last year by Collins’ supporter, Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut.

“We need the capacity for the president to say, Internet Service Provider, we’ve got to disconnect the American Internet from all traffic coming in from another foreign country,” Lieberman told CNN. “Right now, China, the government, can disconnect parts of its Internet in a case of war. We need to have that here, too.”

China? China is now our model for balancing civil liberties and national security? What’s next? Taking economic advice from North Korea?

Glenn Garvin is a columnist for the Miami Herald.

Editorial, Pages 14 on 02/18/2011

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