Obama Administration May Seek Power to Monitor Contents of Private Computer Hard Drives Connected to the Internet
ByLast week, we posted our concerns about leaked legislation aimed at transferring certain powers to regulate the internet from DHS to the Obama White House.
Our concerns were amplified when we were tipped this news report from RussiaToday regarding the President’s plan to further jeopardize the longstanding tradition of reverse engineering beyond the harm done by the Congress and the Clinton Administration through the Digital Millineum Copyright Act.
If these rumors are true, it amounts to a massive power grab by the state under the name of the treaty power. We’ll post a little bit later about constitutional theory and the coming conflict, but for now, we’d love to hear comments from others on whether you believe there is potential for abuse here.
While we understand that enforcing American intellectual property rights in places like China may require some kind of treaty with sharp teeth for enforcement, we don’t want the administration to have the power to take a quick peek at our private data and we certainly don’t want a multinational treaty organization a la the organizations created by GATT and NAFTA to be able to play super cyber-snoop, either.
We have not independently confirmed this report, but we suspect that even Obamabots will be eager to push the President back towards his “transparency” campaign talk after listening to the report that follows. Let’s hope that when Obama talked about transparency he was talking about opening up government for citizen review and not opening up private citizen storage for government review.
