Saturday, June 19, 2010

Scary possibility

Apparently, there is a new bill being pushed through Senate by none other than Joe Lieberman, along with Sen. Collins, called ‘‘Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010’’Here is the article on the subject:



The federal government would have “absolute power” to shut down the Internet under the terms of a new US Senate bill being pushed by Joe Lieberman, legislation which would hand President Obama a figurative “kill switch” to seize control of the world wide web in response to a Homeland Security directive.

Lieberman has been pushing for government regulation of the Internet for years under the guise of cybersecurity, but this new bill goes even further in handing emergency powers over to the feds which could be used to silence free speech under the pretext of a national emergency.



Read the whole thing.  Here is the original link to the bill itself in the PDF format.  In case it goes away for some reason, I saved it to my site here.  Now, admittedly, the sponsors of the bill are not Obama supporters and seem to be more concerned with possible cyber attacks than anything else.  Still, giving the Federal Government that much power to control the Internet seems to be taking national security a bit too far.  I first heard about it on the local radio show, and then found a link to it on Bookworm's site.  I'd be very much interested to see some legal analysis of this bill.  Are my concerns justified?


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