‘Big Brother’ Cybersecurity Law Clears First Hurdle

March 20th, 2009:

Almost a full year ago, Jay Rockefeller stating that the internet should never have been created.

On 2.4.2010, just days ago, the house companion bill, H.R. 4061: Cybersecurity Enhancement Act of 2009 passed, clearing the first hurdle to allow the White House total control over the internet with Jay Rockefeller’s S773 and S778.  Go here for all the necessary information on the elistists’ bills, and/or hit the related links at the bottom of this post.

InfoWars has an excellent take on the passage of House bill 4061, (emphasis mine):

Following the Halloweenesque scare fest on Capitol Hill earlier this week — where National Intelligence director Dennis Blair and CIA director Leon Panetta warned of impending terrorist doom — the has House has The Cybersecurity Enhancement Act (H.R. 4061).

“The House today overwhelmingly passed a bill aimed at building up the United States’ cybersecurity army and expertise, amid growing alarm over the country’s vulnerability online,” reports the New York Times. “The bill, which passed 422-5, requires the Obama administration to conduct an agency-by-agency assessment of cybersecurity workforce skills and establishes a scholarship program for undergraduate and graduate students who agree to work as cybersecurity specialists for the government after graduation.”

As a side note, where are those scholarships for all the health care professionals that are going to be required to replace the doctors that quit, and take care of those extra 30-35 million people?  That has been my biggest beef since the very beginning of this health care romp.  How does one insure 30 million more people and provide them with the same level of care with only 856,000 doctors?  But I digress…

Now, the next biggest installment in the loss of our liberty after the Patriot Act.  If you want to continue to have a means of communicating other than carrier pigeon, better get on down to your local representatives’ office and let them know what you think.  Forget emailing or calling; it is much harder to ignore you when you are standing in their doorway, (and that is what it is going to take).

Cybersecurity bill to give president new emergency powers

The president would have the power to safeguard essential federal and private Web resources under draft Senate cybersecurity legislation.

According to an aide familiar with the proposal, the bill includes a mandate for federal agencies to prepare emergency response plans in the event of a massive, nationwide cyberattack.

The president would then have the ability to initiate those network contingency plans to ensure key federal or private services did not go offline during a cyberattack of unprecedented scope, the aide said.

Ultimately, the legislation is chiefly the brainchild of Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, respectively. Both lawmakers have long clamored for a federal cybersecurity bill, charging that current measures — including the legislation passed by the House last year — are too piecemeal to protect the country’s Web infrastructure.

Their renewed focus arrives on the heels of two, high-profile cyberattacks last month: A strike on Google, believed to have originated in China, and a separate, more disjointed attack that affected thousands of businesses worldwide.

Rockefeller and Snowe’s forthcoming bill would establish a host of heretofore absent cybersecurity prevention and response measures, an aide close to the process said. The bill will “significantly [raise] the profile of cybersecurity within the federal government,” while incentivizing private companies to do the same, according to the aide.

Additionally, it will “promote public awareness” of Internet security issues, while outlining key protections of Americans’ civil liberties on the Web, the aide continued.

Privacy groups are nonetheless likely to take some umbrage at Rockefeller and Snowe’s latest effort, an early draft of which leaked late last year.

When early reports predicted the cybersecurity measure would allow the president to “declare a cybersecurity emergency,” online privacy groups said they felt that would endow the White House with overly ambiguous and far-reaching powers to regulate the Internet.

The bill will still contain most of those powers, and a “vast majority” of its other components “remain unchanged,” an aide with knowledge of the legislation told The Hill. But both the aide and a handful of tech insiders who support the bill have nonetheless tried to dampen skeptics’ concerns, reminding them the president already has vast — albeit lesser-known — powers to regulate the Internet during emergencies.

It is unclear when Rockefeller and Snowe will finish their legislation. And the ongoing debate over healthcare reform, financial regulatory reform, jobs bills and education fixes could postpone action on the floor for many months.

Both lawmakers heavily emphasized the need for such a bill during a Senate Commerce Committee cybersecurity hearing on Wednesday.

“Too much is at stake for us to pretend that today’s outdated cybersecurity policies are up to the task of protecting our nation and economic infrastructure,” Rockefeller said. “We have to do better and that means it will take a level of coordination and sophistication to outmatch our adversaries and minimize this enormous threat.”

So fellow Patriots, how do you feel about losing your money, your land, your food, your guns, your means of communication, and YOUR CONSTITUTION?