Really? 30+ years of RadShack selling these things "cheap", and we're supposed to suddenly and magically believe NOW that we have an issue with civilians owning and using one? I'll reiterate your question from the other side. What's the problem here....that requires fixing?

Prove to me that police scanners have somehow overtaken the popularity of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or the other fashionable forms of mass communication that also shows "where our officers are", and I'll finally believe that encrypted comms have suddenly become an issue important enough to spend millions (or billions, by the time this becomes "standard" across the nation) of taxpayer dollars on.

Sorry, I feel and have compassion for the men and women in uniform, but quite honestly, if you were looking for a absolutely "safe" career, THAT sure as hell wasn't it. Also keep in mind that if your police agency was THAT concerned about your day-to-day safety, they would probably chip in and buy you your own bulletproof vest(usually a personal expense), or perhaps spend a few more dollars making your vehicle(only the largest rolling target on the road) a hell of a lot more bulletproof and safe instead of factory fit and finish. Something tells me we've lost a hell of a lot more lives to these issues in the last 30 years than criminals using a RadShack toy.

Depends on what those in charge define as "critical". Does the Military still use traditional background investigation programs, or should we simply replace that with Facebook and tie an outage to DEFCON 2 status? Should we continue to fund and support any sort of custom nuclear early warning detection system, or is Twitter now used for that, thus deeming it "critical infrastructure"?

These suggestions may sound outlandish to you, but no more outlandish than the idea that this generation would try and define all of these services as "critical infrastructure", along with Netflix and cell phones.

Perhaps we should further investigate this "no-brainer" and define "critical" systems to the younger, more spoiled generation...ask anyone under the age of 25 these days, and they think a damn cell phone is actually a human life support function. Is Facebook now considered critical-path for the Intel community? Is an encrypted satellite uplink necessary for nuclear early warning detection, or do they just use Twitter for that now? Does a Google outage automatically trigger DEFCON 2 status? Gee, I wonder how many other massive systems they could target as "critical" to monitor much more freely than they already do...

Well, I agree that he wants to do enough to pretty much guarantee a short life (literally), but if he were allowed to do his job and do it right, there would be no "Congresscritters" to be concerned with. Congress would perhaps function as it was intended, and not manipulated and completely controlled by Lobbyists for a change, which such activity would be deemed illegal, as it should be.

You expectations are far more than I would ever be inclined to assume for the general population, because there are likely a LOT of people who have fallen victim to all of the above, and yet, they stick around. A car analogy? Nah, this falls more in line with a meth addict analogy.

What the userbase "can" do and "will" do are worlds apart, and will likely remain that way. People simply don't care because they want to be part of it, no matter the cost.

The only thing that is irrational here is peoples penchant for actually pulling out a real credit card tied to pay for a gallon of "virtual" gas to fill up their imaginary tractor to farm their e-veggies, or whatever other nonsense is on there.

Now figure it only takes a fraction of a single percent of the entire population of Facebook to do this in order to generate millions in a single day, from a single game.

Now, if you want to talk real numbers, we can talk about advertising...

Fastest internet trunk in the world isn't going to do you a damn bit of good when your servers get seized. That's kind of the whole point here of a move like this.

And try not to act like Sealand is on Mars. It's six damn miles offshore...certainly not an impossible task for a multitude of network options.

And much like humans have been doing for thousands of years, we can expect users to adjust to such activity and obfuscate their topics through various methods.

Siri might be good, but no way in hell is she a match for the human mind. It is still the most powerful computer.

Uh, no I don't, but apparently the scientific community would like to reverse it's position on global warming, as suggested with this article. Realistically, it seems that neither activity poses a significant impact, so perhaps it's a moot point after all.

No, I'm not going to be completely ignorant here and say that mankind hasn't made it's mark on this blue planet. We certainly have. But THIS particular topic really needs to lean the way of sensible policy driven by facts, not championed with greed driven by influence. We've got enough legislation based on that. Don't need any more.

You seriously don't think that with a blatant structured program like this people (including eventually little Susie) won't be about to put two and two together? Look at history. Sure isn't hard to pinpoint down the inventors of many a destructive device.