Botnets = Dirty Bomb?

Raise your hand if you understand computer security well enough to comprehend how a massive online attack shutting down our communications and financial networks might work. Anyone? Anyone at all? Perfect, then that's the right claim for the next round of fear-mongering.

It's also reportedly just the first step in having the nation's most powerful spy agency begin to take over information security responsibility for large chunks of the net. In January, President Bush signed an order, National Security Presidential Directive 54, that begins that process. The details are murky, since the order itself is classified.

To sell the plan to the private sector, Chertoff and other officials will likely talk about Chinese hackers infiltrating the military's most secure unclassified servers, and perhaps offer another iteration of the claim that a serious computer attack against the United States would deal an economic blow that makes the September 11 terrorist attack look like a parking ticket.

Beyond the hype, of course, there are some serious threats that will go under the microscope at RSA -- most prominently the pernicious influence of botnets, the large collections of compromised Windows machines that are used for online crime ranging from spam to phishing. The largest of these are estimated to be hundreds of thousands of computers strong.

But in keeping with the tone set by the United States, botnets are being recast as the equivalent of a dirty bomb. Consider the title of one panel on the malware: "Protecting the Homeland: How to Win the BotNet Battle?"

THREAT LEVEL's been on this for a little while. It seems that the fear from the War on Terror is wearing off, and we need a new threat so that we can entrust the government with more spying powers over Americans. That's really what is always comes down to isn't it?

The sad thing, as the post mentions, is that there are real security issues that will be overlooked by our government in their quest for even more sweeping powers. Sound familiar?

Let's give this an Orwell rating of 3, for inventing a new war, and attempting to further implement Big Brother directly. A 4 rating would have to be a successful sweeping change, and I'm not gonna bother with rating an event like the creation of Newspeak - that would be beyond 4. I'll give a full rationale for the ratings soon.

"Abortion" is not a fruitful search.

If you can't overturn Roe v. Wade, why not just put out an all encompassing health services search engine that simply pretends abortion doesn't exist? Again, if you don't know it's there, you can't even think of doing it.

I think we need something like the Washington Post fact checker's Pinocchio rating, but rather an Orwell rating to grade each event's relation to our slow slide into 1984. This would maybe be a Orwell rating of 2 (out of four, since I'm using the Pinocchio scale). Not sure what exactly this rating means - perhaps I need to flesh it out more. But 2 sounds about right.

UPDATE: They apparently reversed the censorship the same day. At least someone had some common sense.

Dems in Congress

Honestly, given what we've seen, it's never a surprise when they do capitulate to Bush. It was more of a surprise when the House actually stood up to the President's bullying on FISA. Anyway, what seems odd to me is how inept they are at political strategy. Here's the latest point on this, and I agree completely. Greenwald also mentioned this phenomenon in regard to FISA before they eventually did show a little backbone. That time they did seem to get the point after a while. Will they now?