The New York Times ran the following story on the Internet being the next strategic battlefield.
U.S. Plans Attack and Defense in Cyberspace Warfare
By DAVID E. SANGER, JOHN MARKOFF and THOM SHANKER
Published: April 28, 2009
A new international race has begun to develop cyberweapons and systems to protect against them.
Click to read the full article.
I get this nagging feeling that this is just another step closer to a big brother takeover of the Net.
Watch out for movies on Internet assisted villainy and identity theft stories.
Addendum:
A very dear friend pointed out that the above snippet may have left some of you wondering and suggested I elaborate.
Both the article and the video (linked to from this post) sound like spin to me. Why?
They tried to rally the public about Internet pornography and the people were heard yelling – LEAVE THE INTERNET ALONE! IT’S THE LAST CHANNEL OF FREE SPEECH!.
Therefore a new, bigger threat was needed. Let’s see. What’s on the public mind right now? Banking, unemployment, global economic meltdown, climate change, war, terrorism, technology, mass media noise….
Stack the issues - escalate the problem.
So the new threat is Cyber Terrorism. We need top-down control and we need to spend billions on Cyber Weapons so we can shoot up the digital bad guys to protect our failing economy and bricks and mortal infrastructure. In short - we need to declare war on Cyber Terrorism.
Yeah! Like the war on drugs worked.
Install a decent firewall and leave the cyber stuff to video games. Spend the money on education, health and public works instead.
This stuff isn’t about protecting the nation and the world against cyber terrorists. It’s about control of the Internet. Control over what you and I say, read, see and hear.