Cyber pounding

You may have missed one of the more stupefying performances to come out of Congress last week. Congress being the scene of more concentrated ignorance, idiocy and intransigence than anyplace on the planet.

The event this time was occasioned by FBI Director Jim Comey coming before the House Appropriations committee, filling the poor dears full of sky-is-falling tales of the dangers of (I’m lowering my voice here, so lean in) encrypting data on things like, you know, anything that can record, store or transmit data. Seems like (lowered voice) encryption is a bad, bad thing—in anyone’s hands—and therefore Congress needs to ensure that no one can have it, without but what the good guys (meaning the NSA, the FBI, maybe GCHQ, the CIA and…well, no—no one else, really) can get a back door into the repository.

This specific dog fight has been going on for decades between the NSA in particular and every thoughtful technologist who is serious about the need to protect information for any number of reasons, not least being the protections afforded citizens of the United States by at least two amendments to our Constitution that I can think of off the top of my head.

But—while that argument is becoming kind of tiresome--that’s not why I’m here.

No, the stupefaction to which I referred in my opening graf comes to us courtesy of Congressmoron John Carter (you guessed it: R-Tex.). Because in one of the few bits of C-SPAN footage that will ever go viral, Carter jams his hoof so thoroughly down the front end of his gastro-intestinal tract that it must be currently lodged in his stomach. (And I’m not discounting the possibility that he has more than one of those.)

Because Carter—who (God help us all) chairs the subcommittee on Homeland Security appropriations and who sits on other defense-related subcommittees—declared that he just doesn’t know what to think about this here cyber stuff. In fact, he moaned, “Cyber is just pounding me from every direction.”

Which—in all fairness—he prefaced by admitting that he doesn’t know spit about any of this pounding cyber stuff. Well, at least I think he did—I’m having difficulty unravelling the snarl of words he actually used. Viz. “Every time I hear something, or something just pops in my head -- because I don't know anything about this stuff.”

(Imagine—something just popping into his head! Because there must be a whole lotta emptiness in that space.)

And thence the source of my stupefaction, dear readers. Because this jumped-up pig-ignorant fuck-witted lump has been elected to an office that puts him in the position of deciding policies that will shape the freedoms we enjoy or the tyrannies we endure.

A good 30 years ago, comedian Dick Shawn was asked in an interview why his routine didn’t take shots at the revelations that the Department of Defense was being charged through-the-roof prices for supplies and equipment. Shawn said, “You can’t make a joke about a $600 toilet seat. The $600 toilet seat is the joke.”

I have no doubt that Carter has cost the taxpayers and his corporate contributors heaps more than $600. And he is indeed (along with his colleagues in the House and Senate) the joke. Sadly, he’s not in the least bit funny.

And neither is the idea that any government should have master-key access to every data repository on the planet.