Digital Reichstag Fire?

Citing the cyber attacks on Sony, President Obama is proposing the creation of a federal cyber attack center. The idea is to model it after the National Counterterrorism Center.

From the article:

"We need to develop the same muscle memory in the government response to cyberthreats as we have for terrorist incidents," Lisa Monaco, White House adviser for homeland security and counterterrorism, said in a speech Tuesday. President Barack Obama is expected to seek industry support for the effort when he addresses Silicon Valley executives Friday at a cybersecurity and consumer protection summit at Stanford University. Critics said the federal focus on computer intrusions is long overdue. They said the administration's response has been uneven and poorly coordinated even as the pace of digital attacks shot up fivefold since 2009. The methods of attack, the kinds of targets, the number of victims and the costs of protecting data and repairing networks have also risen dramatically, experts said."

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Government cyber security program

Maybe. But why is government always the go-to whenever there is a problem? Remember, the government created Healthcare.gov, an astonishingly bad website. That website was bad because they hired a Canadian company out of cronyism, as governments are apt to do. I do not see how a government cyber security program will be any better than one privately run. But there's more. Consider the net neutrality issue; the FCC plans on declaring the internet a public utility, and imposing a sort of digital fairness doctrine on IP services. Net neutrality will not allow providers to prioritize data, guaranteeing a slower web experience. It is a way to backdoor regulation of content disagreeable to the FCC and the party which controls that institution. It is little more than a power grab by the Administration designed to shut down critics on the right. And then there is the NSA spying on internet data. Oh, and the proposed internet kill switch. Were the Sony hack an isolated incident there would be little cause for concern. As it stands, this proposal appears to be more another attempt to bring the internet to heel. Control of the dissemination of information is critical to every tyrant, and has likewise been the key to the success of the Progressives for decades. They have hated the internet because it is a largely unregulated market, a kind of informational wild west. They need to put the clown back in the box. The Obama Administration knows this. They helped train the rebels in Egypt who brought down the Mubarak government in the use of the internet as an organizing tool. There can be little question of should the internet be controlled; rather, the question is how to control it. Obama, you may remember, was an Alinsky style community organizer. So a cyber security bureau would have little to do with security and more to do with domination. (Oh, and by the way, there are top people who do not believe North Korea hacked Sony. If not, then who did? The NSA maybe? Sony may have been a digital Reichstag fire.