The "P" Word? You Know, Privacy & Psecurity.

From Wall Street Journal & TheRawStory: Spychief Mike McConnell is drafting a plan “to protect America’s cyberspace” (WSJ’S wording) or “for cyberspace spying” (TheRawStory’s words) that will raise privacy issues and make the current debate over surveillance law look like “a walk in the park,” McConnell tells The New Yorker.

“This is going to be a goat rope on the Hill. My prediction is that we’re going to screw around with this until something horrendous happens.”

At issue, McConnell acknowledges, is that in order to accomplish his plan, the U.S. government must have the ability to read all the information crossing the Internet in the United States in order to protect it from abuse.

Whether this article is based upon a trial balloon or not is irrelevant – this sounds like a recipe for disaster.

Worst case: If this plan is approved and implemented, you can say goodbye to democratic dissent, private love letters, and the open and honest exchange of ideas, along with patient/doctor and client/attorney privilege. Filling the privacy vacuum you could find further politicization of government employment, balance sheets gone astray, abuses of power, businesses that can’t protect the privacy of their clients’ transactions, and the witch hunt of the week, just to name a few possible potential downsides to this power grab.

Best case: Individuals, businesses, non-profits, and academics, along with their congressional representatives from across the political spectrum will see this straw man for what it is and quash it. But not without first having to deal with the two-headed false dilemmas tag team of “privacy vs. security” and the perpetually sanctimonious “if you’ve done nothing wrong, than you’ve nothing to fear” argument.

It appears reasonable to assert that if president Bush doesn’t use email for personal communications because he doesn’t want “you reading [his] personal stuff” then, all other high-minded and principled arguments aside, I’m equally justified in saying that neither do I want any government reading mine.