Annals of National Insecurity: The Fear Mongers & The Incompetents

Newsweek's Terror Watch goes to see a "terror museum" that opened in Denver this wk. "Just a co-inky-dink," says the McCain contributor who financed it & brought Rudy "The Catholic" Giuliani in to open it. We all know there is no such thing as coincidence.

Giuliani said he didn't want to make any political points during his visit. But as soon as he left, he drove straight over to local GOP headquarters and fired away. "The Democrats want to go back on defense against terrorism, want to cut back on wiretapping, want to cut back on surveillance, they want to cut back on interrogation techniques," he said. "Senator McCain wants to be on the offense."

And we know damn well that "terror" is not "the most important global issue of our time." How can we say that?

(Ironically, the exhibit includes an observation from Rand Corporation expert Brian Jenkins who notes that the actual risk to an American of being killed in a terror attack is about one in a million, compared to one-in-7,000 or -8,000 chance of being killed in a car accident.)

In other national security news, the Bush administration has no interest in protecting us & our Internet from cyberattacks. They've been performed against the Pentagon, & against our plucky little democratic (sort of) friend, the Republic of Georgia, by the Chinese & Russkis, respectively. Here's the attitude & approach of the current gov't.

As if to underscore the gap, the government's latest point man on cyber safety used a keynote address the next day to discuss economic theory, explain why Abraham Lincoln was the nation's "first wired president" and dismiss calls for the financial industry and others to beef up security spending. "Over time, the banking industry is pretty rational," said Rod Beckstrom, director of the new National Cyber Security Center, which is part of Homeland Security. "So they're probably doing a good job on investment." He added that private security spending in general was probably at about the right level.In the hallway afterward, executives grumbled that Lincoln had nothing to do with protecting their corporate networks.

Rational isn't the word for the banking industry, over time or over the rainbow.

Beckstrom, an entrepreneur with little security experience before taking the helm of the National Cyber Security Center, is best known as the co-author of a recent book on the power of decentralized organizations. [...] Beckstrom said some effort should be devoted to rethinking the address system and other basics of Internet architecture because they represent a "single point of failure," a weak spot presenting an effective target. Otherwise, he praised the corrective power of the free market. That's not enough for people like Dixon, who said that companies hold back on computer security because it's expensive and they aren't punished when something goes wrong. Although customers who lose information occasionally sue, few change their buying habits after even well-publicized breaches.

Jeezis Hussein Christ. The "free" market. It isn't "free" when it costs people their credit ratings & identities. It may not be long before we hear Bush saying "Heck of job, Beckie!" Right after the whole fooking web is killed & the world as we know it has come to an end. We suppose it'll be an advantage that Sen. McCain can't even turn on a computer (maybe he could figure out how many houses his bottle-blond beer baroness wife owns – & how to get the taxes on them paid – if he had a real estate management program that he knew how to run) & can get the country back to work using carrier pigeons.