The Kill Switch

Who says it can't happen here?

Egypt Flips Internet Kill Switch. Will the U.S.? by Dan Costa, PC Magazine

The legislation was first introduced last summer by Sens. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), and the former has promised to bring it to the floor again in 2011. It isn't called anything as obvious as the Internet Kill Switch, of course. It is called the "Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act." Who could be against that? Anyone who's watching the news on TV today, that's who.

The proposal calls for the Department of Homeland Security to establish and maintain a list of systems or assets that constitute critical cyber-infrastructure. The President would be able to be able to control those systems. He or she would have ability to turn them off. The kicker: none of this would be subject to judicial review. This is just a proposal, mind you, but it certainly warrants concern. Particularly given the heavy-handed example being provided by Egypt.

Reports of Egypt's grand disconnection came first from James Cowie of Renesys, a New Hampshire-based firm that tracks Internet Traffic. As he watched Egypt drop off the grid, Cowie wrote:

"Every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, Internet cafe, website, school, embassy, and government office that relied on the big four Egyptian ISPs for their Internet connectivity is now cut off from the rest of the world."

Keeping citizens off the Internet is becoming standard operating procedure during civil unrest. The Iranian government slowed Internet access to a crawl during last year's civil unrest, but the country online. Myanmar has a little more success blocking its citizens. Egypt's move, however, is unprecedented in its scope.

Who killed Ciara Durkin?

A young lesbian joins the Army National Guard. She is sent to Afghanistan in a desk job working with financial information. While on home leave, she says to her family, "If something happens to me in Afghanistan, don't let it go without an investigation." A month later she is found dead behind a building on Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, with a single bullet wound to the head. The military tells her family first that she died in combat, then changes their story to the death being attributable to "non-combat-related injuries."

Her sister later reveals that during that home leave, Ciara Durkin expressed concern that she had "seen things that she didn’t like and she had raised concerns that had annoyed some people."

The family has not received autopsy results. They have requested an independent autopsy, but the military has not responsed to their request. The military has refused to make Durkin's paperwork available so the family can determine her wishes as to her funeral.

Massachusetts Sens. John Kerry and Edward M. Kennedy have been in touch with Defense Secretary Robert Gates to try to get to the bottom of the case.

We all remember Pat Tillman, who also was said to have been killed by enemy fire and it turned out he was fragged by his own guys. Ciara Durkin was on a secure base and found dead with a single bullet wound to the head as if shot execution-style. Was Durkin killed because she was gay? And if not, what did she find out in the financial information that crossed her desk that someone in the military decided should never see the light of day?

Stay tuned.

The Manchurian Candidate

Jonathan Demme’s ill-timed adaptation of The Manchurian Candidate didn't do too well when it was originally released. Armed with vision, intellect, chutzpah and a well-earned paranoia, Demme created a scary, tough-minded movie that paid respect to the original while having a strong identity of its own. Unfortunately, audiences didn't like the film. The Manchurian Candidate had a soft opening weekend, so-so reviews, and it was ignored until it went away.

It's too bad, because I believe Demme's film was damned good and that it has even more relevance now than it did then.

The Manchurian Candidate is the mean, crazy old grandfather of the Big Secret Conspiracy That Controls Everything genre. Whether it’s films like The Parallax View or episodes of 24, Alias, and The X-Files, you can see the fingerprints of John Frankenheimer’s brilliant movie. But in spite of walking down a very familiar and well-used road, Demme never stumbles into the potholes of being too derivative, too cynical or too dumb. He’s smart enough to keep what works in Frankenheimer’s masterpiece and has the confidence to throw away what doesn’t.

For example, the simplistic psychobabble that mesmerized audiences in 1962 would come across like Brainwashing for Dummies today, so it was junked. Denzel Washington and Liev Schreiber are much better actors than Frank Sinatra and Lawrence Harvey were, so there’s a tragic poignancy to their characters that wasn’t there before. Meryl Streep has a cool, elegant malevolence as Mrs. Shaw, a charming psychopath who would lovingly tuck a napkin underneath your chin to catch the blood before neatly cutting your throat. No, Streep won’t scare the bejeezus out of you like Angela Lansbury did, but she’s damned close. (There's a brilliant sequence in the film where Streep's Mrs. Shaw bullies a room full of cynical pols into giving her son the presidential nomination without even breaking a sweat) More importantly, the doomed soldiers in The Manchurian Candidate aren't bloodless figures as flat as an Army recruitment poster. What happens to them is heartbreaking.

And with a new McDonalds opening up in downtown Beijing, the villains obviously aren’t those dirty commie rats from China this time. Instead, the bad guys are a mysterious global organization named the Manchurian Corporation. As Walt Kelly’s Pogo famously observed (but, as usual, nobody paid any attention to him), “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Jonathan Demme hasn’t “stolen” The Manchurian Candidate from John Frankenheimer. However, this version carries a deeper emotional resonance for me because the characters living in this world feel more real. Hell, the world in this remake feels more real, because as cynical as Frankenheimer's film was, it wasn't cynical enough. Back then, I don't think the original film could have imagined Haliburton, or a treacherous government that ruthlessly exploits its people because it's good business. It's not "Us" vs. "Them" anymore.

It's "Us" vs. "Us".