OT
CYBER-COPS, "WATCHDOGS," AND THE THOUGHT POLICE
"Bad boyz,
Bay boyz,
What-cha gonna do?
What-cha gonna do
when they come for you?"
Ah yes, the theme song of my favorite TV program ? next to The McLaughlin Group, of course: it could serve as the theme song of the new millennium. Cops ? they?re everywhere. Rounding up wild-eyed Algerian "terrorists" as they try to scoot over the border; sending back poor little Elian even as he swims ashore ? and now, it seems, they?re even online, as cyber-cops surf the Internet looking for those bad boyz (and girlz) of cyberspace. Janet Reno?s on the job, wouldn?t you know it, and ready with a proposal for the Web Patrol, "an online network of law enforcement agents" that, according to news reports, would stamp out "the dark side of the Internet."
KEYSTONE CYBER-COPS
"There is a dark side of hacking, crashing networks and viruses that we absolutely must address," she said ? forgetting that the hackers? biggest successes have been government sites, such as the White House, the FBI, NATO. If the feds can?t protect their own sites from a continuing assault, how are they supposed to protect the rest of us from "the dark side of hacking"? Just asking.
THE DARK SIDE OF JANET RENO ? IS THERE ANY OTHER?
Never mind ?the dark side of the Internet" ? I?m worried about the dark side of Janet Reno. This is a woman at the head of an agency that we are now learning machine-gunned the inhabitants of the Waco "compound" for the "crime" of having nonconformist religious beliefs. And now she wants to set up "LawNet," a brand-new federal agency charged with hunting down "cyber-criminals." "I envision a network that extends from local detectives to the FBI to investigators abroad," she told the National Association of Attorneys General.
TOTAL FEDERAL POWER
This would be useful in getting around all those messy jurisdictional obstacles to total federal power, and give her cyber-cops the kind of reach that a real national police force needs to keep tabs on the Bad Guyz. Who be they? According to Reno, the FBI took a survey of the Fortune 500 and discovered that a whopping 62 percent claimed that the security of their computer systems had been breached this year. This statistic, however, is widely derided in computer circles. As Thomas C. Greene put it in The Register (UK), this figure "strikes us as somewhat inflated, and most likely the result of considerable statistical massaging intended to alarm the public." Yes, indeed, and the key word here is intended . . .
DIAGNOSIS: MEDIA OVEREXPOSURE
We all saw how the government generated and manipulated the Millennium/terrorist/Y2K hysteria to launch a nationwide witch hunt, crack down on domestic dissidents, and fund a massive federal "upgrade" program In this context, is anyone surprised that the New England Journal of Medicine reports "outbreaks of mass hysteria, including fears of poison gases in the air, may be on the rise"? Researchers say fear of "bioterrorism" and "environmental toxins" is increasing ? and with it "outbreaks of short-term, widespread psychogenic illness." Doctors called in to investigate reports of mass illness often diagnose it as yet another case of mass hysteria, but are afraid to say so for fear of offending their patients and exacerbating their anxiety. And the contagion is airborne, says the study, spread over the airwaves: "Dramatic and prolonged media coverage frequently enhances such outbreaks."
THE USES OF HYSTERIA
The authors of the study, according to Reuters, "recommended that officials make a return to normality in the affected community their main goal." But normality is precisely what our power-mad government officials do not want to return to, for they thrive on crises, on threats ? real or imagined ? to the commonweal, and the bigger the better. Their power, prominence, and purses all swell with the tide of mass hysteria, and they have been going all-out lately to stoke the public?s anxiety to a fever pitch. Everything new is a crisis requiring some kind of regulatory campaign or law enforcement crackdown: the coming of the new millennium, the coming of the computer age, the phenomenal growth of the Internet ? the Janet Renos of this world miss no opportunity to extend their reach ? in this case, right into your computer.
SINKING INTO SERFDOM
If you?re in a state of constant hysteria, however, you may not notice that you?re sinking into serfdom. This is the key role played by mass hysteria ? over terrorism, global warming, or the "threat" posed by Slobodan Milosevic to the peace of Europe ? and it therefore should hardly come as a shock that governments, and especially the US government, are the main source and spreaders of what is in effect a collective mental illness.
"FIDNET" REVISITED
Reno?s proposal is essentially a revamped version of the "FIDNET" scheme that had civil libertarians and the cyber-community up in arms last year. The Clinton administration?s proposal is a truly Orwellian vision of virtually every computer system in the country embedded with "intrusion detection monitors" at all "key nodal points." As the Center for Democracy and Technology commented: "FIDNET is an ill-defined monitoring system of potentially broad sweep. It seems to place monitoring and surveillance at the center of the government's response to a problem that is not well suited to such measures."
NO CONTROLLING CENTRAL AUTHORITY (cont)
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