The War on Internet Freedom

As I predicted when Obama won the election, government's war on internet freedom has expanded dramatically. The justice department is already shutting down web servers with thousands of blogs and ordering the owner not to speak about it. Congressmen want to give the president an internet kill switch.  Congress has introduced a bill to shut down websites ostensibly to protect copyrights. But governments use IP as an excuse to oppress political opposition. The head of the NSA wants to partition the internet into a secure government section. Frankly, I'd love to have the government off the regular internet, but nothing good can come from this proposal.

Maybe worst of all, Obama wants Congress to force all digital communications to use encryption that can be broken by the government and anybody else. From the point of view of civilization, this is bizarre. In the private sector, companies work diligently to uncover and fix software vulnerabilities that enable people to exploit the internet and gain access to personal information. The US government wants to mandate that all internet and wireless communication software purposefully implement a vulnerability that its agents and any other hacker can exploit to gain access to personal information. We know how this will be abused by government let alone anybody else who feels like exploiting it.

Net neutrality suddenly looks like a minor regulation compared to all this.

This isn't just a Democrat issue by any means. Republicans and Democrats are teaming up to wage war on internet freedom.