That's what it boils down to. Our national security interests depend on the telecom corporations snitching on the customers they're supposed to serve, while "private security guards" make an example in Iraq of what happens to people who don't behave.

While the electronic home invasions by the telecommunications industry on behalf of the federal government has finally gotten the people to sit up and take notice (everybody knows that people don't need immunity from prosecution, if they've done nothing wrong), it almost looks like Senator Chris Dodd holds the key in his hand to a much bigger story.

I think I actually heard it first from the mouth of Donald Rumsfeld, when he was still riding high as Secretary of Defense that the wars of the future would be fought in cyberspace. It struck me as a rather peculiar thing for a fellow well known for standing at his writing desk and dispatching notes written in his own hand to be blathering on about warfare in the electronic age. But, I think it was in the context of an admission that the errors of 9/11, as well as the intelligence failures in Iraq, were a consequence of not having enough people on the ground to provide humintel, implying that this was going to be corrected. That was a mistake. It hasn't happened and it wasn't planned. The commitment to electronic systems as an instrument of warfare is as strong as ever. We just weren't supposed to notice.

Originally, you know, the internet was developed by universities under contract to the Department of Defense. That's what he meant when Al Gore claimed that he'd provided the impetus for the invention of the internet. In any case, the universities proved unreliable and the internet escaped into the world wide web and the hands of people everywhere.

As the current czar of cyber warfare in the Department of the Air Force, Dr. Lani Kass puts it:

Cyberspace is something on which, as a technologically advanced nation, the United States is hugely dependent. You use your ATM card, you use your cell phone and you go to an Internet cafe. If somebody is pregnant, they go have a sonogram. If they are sick, they have an X-ray or an MRI. All those things are in cyberspace. Our life has become totally bounded, dependent on cyberspace. Therefore, the importance of that domain is not only for how we fight, but also for our way of life.

"Cross-domain dominance means being able to deliver effects in all domains at the same time, at the speed of sound and at the speed of light. We cannot afford to allow an enemy to achieve cross-domain dominance before us. This is the nature of the transformational mission the chief and the secretary gave us. Enemies who cannot match us on land, at sea, in the air, or in space, are exploiting the fact that in cyberspace you have a very low entry cost.

"Low cost is what makes that domain extremely attractive to nations, criminal and terrorist organizations who could not possibly attack the United States symmetrically. All you need to do is buy a laptop or a cell phone. As a matter of fact, you can just go to an Internet café and not even buy that stuff. You can buy yourself a phone card and you can cause high-impact effects," he said.

"What I see in the future is true cross-domain integration, to deliver effects, like we deliver in air and space, where the commander has at his disposal, truly sovereign options, as stated in our mission, which is the ability to do whatever we want, wherever we want, whenever we want, and however we want -- kinetically, and nonkinetically and at the speed of sound and at the speed of light."

Sounds like a grandiose plan doesn't it? That Dr. Lani Kass used to be an Israeli military officer is probably not as relevant as the fact that her program is being run on the cheap, like most everything undertaken by what some people refer to as capitalist Pirates

Bloody footprints to Baghdad and Basra mark the first tentative steps in the Bush men's apocalyptic adventure. They have embarked on a project to bring to heel a world that they hold in great contempt, but of which they have no understanding whatsoever. Products of a white American cultural bubble that glories in its transparency to the globe but sees only its own illusions staring back, the Pirates play at psychological warfare and succeed in psyching out only themselves.

While that was a prescient assessment, if ever there was one, the writer overlooked that the purpose of invading Iraq was less the act of Pirates going after booty, as an effort to capture an island on which they could hole up and from which the assaults on cyberspace could be waged. That, after all is what the long-term bases are for.

But, there are two problems with electronic warfare. The first is that it's very expensive to maintain the systems. Which is probably why, in addition to the secrecy afforded private corporations by the umbrella of proprietary information, the Pirates reached an accord with the telecommunications industry to piggy back the conquest of cyber space on the commercial networks that have already been built out. And that, my friends, is what Chris Dodd is challenging with his hold on the FISA ammendment legislation.

As the Air Force explains it:

Elder said partnership with civilian agencies like law enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security, which has the lead in securing the nation’s critical infrastructure including its cyber-capacity, was the key for the Air Force.

“What we’re really trying to do with these partnerships is close the gaps” between military and civilian authorities and agencies. “We need to have clearer interaction with these other agencies,” he said.

Some believe the laws governing cyberspace might need to be changed, he said. “Ultimately they may, but until we fully understand how it works between these very different areas of business -- law enforcement, homeland security, commerce -- we can’t just say, ‘Here’s what we should change.’”

But other Air Force officials see U.S. military policy as too timid. “Legislation, policies and international law are lagging the technology” in the cyber-domain, Lani Kass, a senior adviser to U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Moseley, told another recent conference. “The United States is late to the fight.”

She said U.S. tactics in cyberspace were constrained by political correctness. “Today it is much easier to get permission to kill the enemy, to drop a bomb on a terrorist hideout, than to culturally offend them. In other words, take a beheading video, take it off the net, and substitute -- whatever you like: Bay Watch? The technology is there. It’s there in the civilian world. But the policies are such that you can’t do that.”

Who knows whether there are turf wars between the Air Force and the Navy? Is the Air Force fleet being allowed to age because in the minds of the leadership, they've already transitioned to the electromagnetic field? We might do well to remember that the Cuban Missile Crisis was caused because the Pentagon went ahead with locating missiles in Turkey even though President John F. Kennedy had directed them not to. Does it matter that Rumsfeld probably doesn't understand the electronics at all? Probably not. Besides, Robert Gates, who's got a long background in information systems is now in charge of seeing to the completion of the electronic espionage network in Iraq.

But, if the security of our commercial, financial networks is not guaranteed and it would seem that the Pirates have indeed taken over, then, as the Black Commentatory editorialized soon after the invasion:

"In self-defense, the world will be forced to reorganize itself, to create new mechanisms of trade and security in place of the institutions that the Bush men are deliberately savaging. The Americans will be left out of these arrangements."

And that, one suspects, is what Chris Dodd is trying to prevent by insisting that the privacy of our communications be respected.