President Obama is trying to rob you of your freedom and now he’s taking over the whole internet and making it buy health insurance from Kenya! Sorry, just a little gift for our extreme right-wing readers. The President has signed an executive order outlining how the U.S. government handles telecommunications in the event of an emergency.
From The Verge:
“Assignment of National Security and Emergency Preparedness Communications Functions” codifies the steps that agencies need to take in order to make sure that communications networks will keep running in the event of a natural disaster or national security emergency. Taking as its basic premise that “the Federal Government must have the ability to communicate at all times and under all circumstances to carry out its most critical and time sensitive missions,” it assigns various agencies to advise the President, propose testing and redundancy requirements, or outline general emergency preparedness rules.
But there’s a bit of a kerfuffle going on over one section of the order having to do with the powers of the Secretary of Homeland Security, who would (again from The Verge) “oversee the development, testing, implementation, and sustainment” of emergency measures on systems that include private “non-military communications networks.”
That rings alarm bells for some of an overreach by government and a means of giving the President, or at least the administration, greater power over the Internet itself.
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