More interesting reading: this Slate article casts a jaundiced eye at the “National Strategy To Secure Cyberspace” pushed out by the Bush administration last month. Part of a broader strategy to fill the airwaves and the public consciousness with FUD – “fear, uncertainty and doubt,” this time by painting a picture of computer-savvy regimes ready to knock out our electricity and phone lines and electric blankets from their remote terminals. Except that the purported incidents in the past are misrepresented or overstated, the threat in the future appears to be remote, and the proposed solutions are lame. (Well, some of them might be effective if the federal government can construct a working monolithic data warehouse cross-indexing every activity in the daily lives of every US citizen and a fair number of people in other parts of the world – a computer project so huge and difficult it dwarfs anything ever before attempted. And if we abjectly surrender most of our civil liberties and privacy to enable that data mining. But that’s for another discussion.)
