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Arms depot in Benghazi, blown up last night by government forces in Libya.

Last night, we got the news that the Benghazi arms depot that was arming the Libyans fighting against the government was blown up, with 37 reported deaths so far and countless injuries. Coupled with this news, I'd say that things for the people of Libya are getting much, much worse:

At about 7 a.m. Eastern Time on Thursday Internet traffic coming in and out of Libya dropped to nearly zero, where it remains, according to Google's Transparency Report.

Libya had previously lost much of its connectivity on Feb. 18. The country's Internet activity returned at about 1 a.m. Eastern time after being out for about seven hours. Initially some analyst s thought it might be the Libyan government attempting a "dry run" of cutting off the Internet and other communications the way the Egyptian government did in January.

But James Cowie, chief technology officer of Renesys, an information technology consultancy, said this time it is different from the case in Egypt, or even the previous service outages. "It's like a post-apocalyptic scenario where the roads are there, there just isn't any traffic," he said.

In Egypt, the government simply told the Internet service providers to shut the servers down. Technically, it was not very sophisticated. If a computer from another country tried to "ping" a server in Egypt, there was simply no answer.

This time, the servers in Libya are answering, in the sense that the route is clear and open. But there is no traffic. If one were to try and send a data packet from Libya to the U.S., for example, the server in Libya would send it to a "black hole route," Cowie said. That means it would be held in place. The sender might never know what happened.

Users of services such as YouTube and Twitter would see a problem because neither is hosted in Libya, so the moment one required a response from the site it would be clear that something was amiss. In one sense, what the Libyan telecoms operator is doing is not dissimilar to the "throttling" of traffic that happens on any network when users exceed their data limits. The data is either slowed down or the subscriber gets charged more money. In this case the throttling was simply set at zero.

I've been following this issue for a while and was pretty surprised to conclude that the government doesn't have much choice. The way data travels means the entire country's far too vulnerable to cyberattacks, and they don't really have many effective options that don't to some degree compromise our privacy. The question is, who can we trust with that kind of power? We need a robust public debate over that very issue, but since they dumped this on the last day before a three-day weekend, I'm guessing not so much:

The Obama administration will proceed with a Bush-era plan to use National Security Agency assistance in screening government computer traffic on private-sector networks, with AT&T as the likely test site, according to three current and former government officials.

President Obama said in May that government efforts to protect computer systems from attack would not involve "monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic" and Department of Homeland Security officials say that the new program will only scrutinize data going to or from government systems.

But the program has provoked debate within DHS, the current and former officials said, because of uncertainty over whether private data can be shielded from unauthorized scrutiny, how much of a role NSA should play and whether the agency's involvement in warrantless wiretapping under the Bush administration would draw controversy.

[...] Under a classified pilot program approved during the Bush administration, NSA data and hardware would be used to protect the networks of some civilian government agencies. Part of an initiative known as Einstein 3, the pilot called for telecommunications companies to route the Internet traffic of civilian government agencies through a monitoring box that would search for and block malicious computer codes.

AT&T, the world's largest telecommunications firm, was the Bush administration's choice to participate in the test, which has been delayed for months as the Obama administration determines what elements of the Bush plan to preserve, former government officials said. The pilot was to have been launched in February.

"To be clear, Einstein 3 development is proceeding," DHS spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said. "We are moving forward in a way that protects privacy and civil liberties."

[...] The program is the most controversial element of the $17 billion cybersecurity initiative that the Bush administration launched in January 2008. Einstein 3 is crucial, advocates say, in an era in which hackers have compromised computer systems at the Commerce and State departments, and have siphoned off sensitive military jet data from a defense contractor.

I wish my headline was just hyperbole, but it's not: it's the truth.

A minor blog outed one of the victims of Mark Foley's sexual predations. This violation of an abused kid's privacy was immediately linked and given heavy Internet traffic by leading right-wing bloggers Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit and Roger L. Simon of Pajamas Media.

Pajamas is so disgraced by this act that they should immediately close their doors. Since they won't, its few remaining liberal members should quit immediately.

As for the right-wing, what can I say? This act is vile beyond description.

It's stunning, isn't it? There is literally no act of evil that the Right isn't willing to perpetrate to keep itself in power. There's more on the GOP as the Party of the Devil here.
(via Atrios)