God, what an arrogant smarter-than-thou twit this guy is. I wouldn't mind his arrogance so much, though, if he were at least correct. But he's totally wrong. Why couldn't al-Qaeda, or any other group, plant a ton of worms, viruses and ping flood programs on thousands of unprotected computers all over the world, and then set them all to go off at the same time? Any one of us could do it, on a smaller scale, right now if we wanted to. The programs, the viruses, and detailed instructions are freely available all over the web. We know from experience that the release of a single fast-propagating virus can slow the entire Internet to a crawl. We know as fact that the ping floods that take down entire sites (remember that incident in early 2000 where CNN, Amazon, eBay and E-Trade were all knocked offline at the same time?) are usually caused by the actions of a single person. Get enough geeks together on a project - maybe a few dozen, you wouldn't need hundreds - and they could absolutely wreak enough havoc on the Net to bring it to a near-standstill while destroying data on a lot of people's Windows PCs. If one bad-boy virus can slow the Net down by half, what will happen if three such viruses are released at the same time? And if those viruses were truly destructive, as no other virus-writer has yet dared release? Boom, instant disaster.
and second, we've seen a tremendous interest by the current administration in encouraging citizens to rat each other out for 'suspicious behavior'.
And here is where the author admits his entire article is bunk pulled right out of his ass. This is like saying that because California just passed that hideous auto-emissions bill, the CHP is going to fly to Detroit and arm-twist auto executives into allowing them to plant tracking devices in all new cars. Correlation does not equal causation, especially when nothing has been caused in the first place.
One example of this trend is the Department of Justice (DoJ) Operation TIPS, a pilot program establishing a snitch-network of workers eager to report on citizens. The postal service was originally solicited, but demurred.
And then changed their minds and decided to participate. If you're going to write a pissy rant disguised as a news article, Mr. Greene, at least bother to get your facts straight.
Then why haven't they/you?