I Voted For John McCain And All I Got Was this Stupid Internet Surveillance Program

They told me if I voted for John McCain, the government would ramp up its monitoring of the Internet and they were right*!

The U.S. government is launching an expansive program dubbed “Perfect Citizen” to detect cyber assaults on private U.S. companies and government agencies running critical infrastructure such as the electricity grid and nuclear power plants, according to people familiar with the program.

The surveillance by the National Security Agency, the government’s chief eavesdropping agency, would rely on a set of sensors deployed in computer networks for critical infrastructure that would be triggered by unusual activity suggesting an impending cyber attack, though it wouldn’t persistently monitor the whole system, these people said.

Well, that doesn’t sound too bad, right? They’d only be watching “critical infrastructure” and only sometimes. After all, there’s no chance someone could launch a cyber-assault when they weren’t watching!

Of course, some of us might recall the attempt last year to define “critical infrastructure” as “any computer network the President wants”. We might also remember the bloody shrieking from the left, Barack Obama included, over George Bush’s “illegal wiretapping” of phone calls to terrorists overseas. We might remember that well, but that was then.

This is now and the power is in new hands. Feel safe?

But really, who am I to argue this point? I’m just some blogger who cringes at the possibility of CEO getting “incentives” from the government to allow it to plant its little cyberspies any old where it pleases. You shouldn’t listen to me. Listen to this big, important military person, who says everything will be just fine.

However, a U.S. military official called the program “long overdue” and said any intrusion into privacy is no greater than what the public already endures from traffic cameras.

There. Traffic cameras work perfectly well and aren’t likely to be misused. Nope, not even a little bit.

*I stole this schtick from Professor Glenn Reynolds, who clearly owns it. I hope he doesn’t mind my having a little fun with it.

Other Posts of Interest:

• More Would-Be Islamist Murderers Headed to Jail

Tags: Cyberspace, Domestic Terrorism, NSA, Privacy

Category: Fighting the Islamists, The Rise of the Nanny State