The government wants in your network. (Via here.) According to the Washington Post (emphasis mine):
The proposals, in Senate legislation that could be introduced as early as today, would broaden the focus of the government’s cybersecurity efforts to include not only military networks but also private systems that control essentials […] At the same time, the bill would add regulatory teeth to ensure industry compliance with the rules, congressional officials familiar with the plan said yesterday.
Sounds good on the surface. They even say:
Blair acknowledged there will be privacy concerns about centralizing cybersecurity, and he said the program should be designed in a way that gives Americans confidence that it is “not being used to gather private information.”
Stop and ponder this for a while. The government gets to dictate how you secure your network. This means that they get to specify the hardware and the operating system. Do we really want to criminalize open source software that hasn’t been vetted by some cybernetic equivelent of the FDA? This is giving the government the ability to shut down any networked application it wants; everything from Bittorrent to Facebook.