Making up threats

Last week, it was credit cards, this week it’s cyber security – it seems like we have a new crisis pop up almost everyday that President Obama feels a need to protect us from. I don’t have any crisis in my life – I pay my credit cards, if I ever use them – when the credit card companies try to raise my rates, I threaten to close the accounts and they magically change their minds. My computers work just fine with the software I bought myself. But somehow, the Obama Administration thinks I need to let their camel’s nose under my tent corner. (NY Post link)

“We’re not as prepared as we should be, as a government or as a country,” he said, calling cyber threats one of the most serious economic and military dangers the nation faces.

He said he will soon pick the person he wants to head up a new White House office of cyber security, and that person will report to the National Security Council as well as to the National Economic Council, in a nod to the importance of computers to the economy.

While the newly interconnected world offers great promise, Obama said it also presents significant peril as well. The president declared: “Cyberspace is real, and so is the risk that comes with it.”

We don’t seem to be prepared for anything these days. The solution is always more government. With more government comes more taxes, more regulation and more intrusion. Remember Jimmy Carter’s Energy czar, who became part of the new (then) Energy Department that was going to make us energy independent? Of course, they’ve had thirty years to make us energy independent, so…any minute now.

The internet, on the other hand, is working just fine – that probably won’t be the case after the government gets it’s crap-smeared fingers in it. Of course, Obama says that corporations aren’t taking care of us. Why wouldn’t they? They have a financial stake in the internet – if something breaks, they lose money. I’ve been conned on the internet – Amazon made me whole when some fraud sold me something that didn’t exist. Another person who sold me a fake signed first edition of a Frederick Forsythe book is being prosecuted by Ebay – sentencing is in September.

When a previous bank I had found that my bank card number was stolen during a computer-looting of Western Union a few years back, they had a new card in my hands before I knew what had happened. The only reason I’m not with that bank is because they were seized by the FDIC when banks first started collapsing in 2007 because they’d made a bunch of bad mortgage loans in Atlanta.

I pay money for fraud protection that also includes insurance if I do get burned. Yet, twice in the last few years, government employees have had their laptops stolen from their homes and those laptops had my Social Security number in them – that’s why I purchased fraud protection – to protect myself from government buffoonery.

Yet everyone is ready to support this latest brainchild from the Obama Administration. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t trust the Bush Administration either – the anti-Federalists taught me to be wary of government.

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Economy