The government concluded its "Cyber Storm" wargame Friday, its biggest-ever exercise to test how it would respond to devastating attacks over the Internet from anti-globalization activists, underground hackers and bloggers.
Bloggers?
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.
The rest of the article is about responses to serious mayhem that hackers can inflict on computer syystems, but the reference to bloggers made me nervous. One man's "misinformation campaigns and activist calls" are another man's freely expressed opinions and political participation. True, I don't slap this administration arouund all that much; I think they're probably doing the best they can. but with the strong chance that we'll have a Kleptocrat in the White House next, coupled with the Left's distaste for free speech in the Blogosphere and on the radio, I wonder how much of what's said on conservative blogs will suddenly become a "security threat" if this becomes a precedent. Remember the rants and venom that were directed at talk radio during the Clinton years? The Blogosphere is populated by more conservatives than liberals, just as the airwaves were, because it's harder for political correctness to be enforced here than in the MSM.
I wouldn't want blogging to become prima facie evidence of subversion, either now for lefties or in three years for conservatives. Free speech, as we've seen in the hooraw over the Danish cartoons, is like pregnancy: you can't do it halfway. Either the Internet is free or it's not. And I'll call for action or disseminate information any time I damn well please. If you don't like it, shut me down now.
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