The proposed “internet kill switch”, which passed out of the Senate Homeland Security Committee last week, has met some opposition:
“Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) has introduced his own cybersecurity legislation with Sen. Orrin Hatch, and he had some harsh words for a competing bill sponsored by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security. Bond said that bill, which has been criticized for allegedly giving the president a ‘kill switch‘ over the Internet, weighs down the private sector with mandates and puts too much on the plate of the already overburdened Department of Homeland Security. Sen. Bond’s bill would create a new position in the Pentagon, reporting directly to the President, in charge of coordinating all civilian cybersecurity. Any private-sector involvement would be voluntary and free from legal challenge, rather than mandated.”
Remember when Bond and Hatch thought it was well within the authority of the government to force private telecommunication companies to spy on phone calls without a constitutionally mandated warrant? Wow things are different now that we have a Democrat in the White House.
Yes – Hatch and Bond worry about privacy, but only when it is the privacy of big business. When it comes to the privacy of you and me, well they think we can go Cheney ourselves.
And now for a little history lesson on Orrin Hatch and the tech world from 2003:
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) suggested Tuesday that people who download copyright materials from the Internet should have their computers automatically destroyed.
But at the time of Hatch’s proposal, it was noticed that he was using illegal software on his Senate site:
But Hatch himself is using unlicensed software on his official website, which presumably would qualify his computer to be smoked by the system he proposes.
The senator’s site makes extensive use of a JavaScript menu system developed by Milonic Solutions, a software company based in the United Kingdom. The copyright-protected code has not been licensed for use on Hatch’s website.
So hypocrisy is pretty much the norm for brainless dinosaurs like Orrin Hatch. I wouldn’t trust this guy to be a greeter at the local Wal-Mart.