Dancing Spychief Wants to Tap Into Cyberspace

Spychief Mike McConnell is drafting a plan to protect America’s cyberspace 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 in the issue set to hit newsstands Monday. “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 government must have the ability to read all the information crossing the Internet in the United States in order to protect it from abuse. Congressional aides tell The Journal that they, too, are also anticipating a fight over civil liberties that will rival the battles over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Part of the lawmakers’ ire, they have said, is the paltry information the administration has provided. The cyberspace security initiative was first reported in September by The Baltimore Sun, and some congressional aides say that lawmakers have still learned more from the media than they did from the few Top Secret briefings they have received hours before the administration requested money in November to jump start the program.

Siobhan Gorman

I guess I'm convinced that Al Gore or John Kerry would have been worse, I'm just hard-pressed to see how any more.

In the waning months of his presidency, Bush seems determined to make sure he is not only the worst President in history, but the most destructive. If the Bush Administration succeeds in getting this done, it will have me wishing for the happy, carefree days of the Carter Administration.