Imagine it’s 1953 and a steel strike threatens to shut down defense plants crucial to President Truman’s prosecution of the Korean War. Faced with a national emergency, Truman seizes the steel plants, claiming an inherent power to act. The Supreme Court disagrees, limiting the President’s power to seize private property absent a constitutional or statutory mandate to do so. Now fast forward to earlier this week when two Senators introduced a bill that “Give ‘em Hell Harry” would love; a bill that gives the President the power to seize and shut down the Internet or any other “critical infrastructure ” in the “interest of national security.”
Read that last sentence again; no imaging here. The bill is real and now pending before the United States Senate.
The bill, dubbed the “Cyber security Bill of 2009,” sponsored by Sens. Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe, is the opening salvo in what promises to be a pitched battle about how to best protect the nation’s critical infrastructure — including its privately held communications and information networks — from increasing threats in a way that does not undermine privacy and civil liberties.
Read the full article: Seize the Net.
More information on the cybersecurity bill of 2009:
A Bill to shift cybersecurity to the White House
Bill Would Grant President Unprecedented Cyber-security Powers
The Cybersecurity Act of 2009: Trying to create order from chaos
New World Order wants to shut down the internet:
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