We don’t want the smoking gun to be a 404 message. Recently the White House and Pentagon have kicked their program to terrorize sow fear into the general population with the threat of “cyberterrorism” into high gear. In fact, now the cyber threat is a bigger threat than actual terrorism. Some even insist that instead [...]

It’s anybody’s guess where the fiscal slope talks are going after today’s leadership session, but today marks the end of the first week of the lame duck session in Congress. What exactly got done? Well, the Senate confirmed a director for the FDIC for the first time since Sheila Bair left 16 months ago. The [...]

The Obama Administration will consider an executive order on cybersecurity in the wake of a defeat in the Senate on a bill to deal with the issue. This is another example of the executive branch taking action when the legislative branch bogs down in gridlock. The result is a stronger executive and an increasingly irrelevant [...]

The Senate, unable to come up with a schedule for amendments, blocked the cybersecurity bill today in an outcome that, despite being a result of Republican obstruction, satisfied Internet activists who had been urging a no vote. You can see from the roll call that this was generally a partisan vote. The backstory is that [...]

The Senate easily advanced a motion to proceed on their version of a cybersecurity bill yesterday, by an 84-11 vote. Clearly this bill, a separate version of which has already passed the House, has a broad degree of support. As if on cue yesterday, the head of the National Security Agency Keith Alexander, warned about [...]

The Senate will vote on a cybersecurity bill that’s taken years to get to the floor. The House has already passed a bill known as CISPA, which raised the ire of privacy and technology activists. Even the White House threatened a veto. Now the Senate will get their turn, after a series of maneuvers designed [...]

Like me, Congress was out of town last week. I guess the main difference is that they get 20 or so of these a year and I get one, but no matter. Today, at least, we start from the same position. And so what do they have planned for the next few days? Well, in [...]

I mentioned earlier that the White House weighed in on CISPA, the cybersecurity bill working its way through Congress. Previously they had been generally supportive of it, at least from the words of counter-terrorism czar John Brennan. But now, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council has criticized the bill. CISPA would encourage companies to [...]

Over the past couple weeks, another grassroots protest has emerged against legislation that would affect the Internet. It’s at a lower level than the SOPA/PIPA protests so far, but the activism against CISPA, which is considered cybersecurity legislation, is following the same trajectory. Many experts have described the threats from CISPA, particularly to the privacy [...]