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Saturday, February 18, 2006

Well isn't that special...

I guess we're all potential terrorists and threats to America now.

Most of last week's news reports on the DHS's Cyberstorm excercise missed a very interesting piece of information about the program. Alongside legitimate concerns about cyber-terrorists hacking into nuclear power plants, disrupting financial institutions and power grids and so forth, the Associated Press reports that-

"Participants confirmed parts of the worldwide simulation challenged government officials and industry executives to respond to deliberate misinformation campaigns and activist calls by Internet bloggers, online diarists whose "Web logs" include political rantings and musings about current events."

That's worth repeating-

"Participants confirmed parts of the worldwide simulation challenged government officials and industry executives to respond to...activist calls by Internet bloggers, online diarists whose "Web logs" include political rantings and musings about current events."

Well, excuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuse me!

My thanks to Beekslayer Karen for alerting me to this little tidbit. It is certainly a sobering one, especially considering recent stories about blog hosts like Yahoo and Google stifling free speech and rolling over on bloggers for the Chinese government. Do you think they'd raise one finger to protect an American's free speech rights if the American government told them not to? How long would all our blogs be around if George Bush yelled "terrorist!" at them? I know damn well Yahoo wouldn't have the balls to stand up for American values, but I used to think Google might. But now I tend to doubt it.

By the way, I didn't write any of that. My evil twin did. Damn, he keeps getting on here and writing bad stuff about the government. Bad evil twin, bad!

If any government agents are interested, I can give you his address. Or Google can. They probably already have.

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