I came across a great article over the weekend discussing the proposed Cybersecurity Act of 2009, currently in working draft status in Congress (as a sidenote, I was directed to it via the GovLoop daily “Sweet Tweets” blog, an excellent source of Gov 2.0 news for anyone interested in this space).  You may have read about this bill last week; the preamble states that it’s designed to protect online commerce, both for the US and its partners, by developing a “cadre of [IT] specialists to improve and maintain effective cybersecurity defenses,” a proposal that I imagine most citizens would support.

The issue of cybersecurity is nothing new; you can read Obama and Biden’s homeland security agenda, and specifically their objectives for “protecting our information networks” right here.  On a more interesting note, the issue of a Katrina-like disaster in cyberspace has been a topic of major interest over the past few months.  In February, former Whitehouse cybersecurity official Paul Kurts addressed the lack of a ‘FEMA for the internet’.  More recently, the online discourse surrounding cybersecurity has ramped up substantially, particularly following the anxiety over last week’s Conficker Worm.  This only stengthened the push for an American cyberecurity czar, which according to US Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), is an absolute necessity.  In a statement released last week, Snowe (co-author of the new bill) argued that “if we fail to take swift action, we, regrettably, risk a cyber Katrina.”

The bill’s most striking proposal (Section 18, paragraph 2), and the central issue of the article I cited above, is that the new legislation would give the President emergency authority to halt web traffic, effectively shutting down the internet.  Not surprisingly, this created something of an uproar among political bloggers over the weekend, many of whom took issue with this expansion of federal powers.

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