Speaking simply on the issue itself, I think the issue is pretty straightforward.
Mccain is right, something does need to be done for electronic security, of course that falls under the whole catagory of "no kidding, really? I would never have guessed". After all if Anonymous can do this kind of damage, just think about what happens if another goverment decides to get serious about a cyberware attack (or has already been more active here than we currently believe).
The goverment being behind the times when it comes to new technologies and how they work is one of the problems with the US and a system designed to change so slowly, this does NOT mean that it cannot and will not catch up though, and gain a greater understanding of the issues. The whole "system of tubes" thing for example is now a joke 5 years (half a decade) old. People don't remain ignorant forever.
The big question in the US is not so much whether the goverment can deal with issues like this, but the issue of civil liberties in doing so. In a country with tons of laws to protect privacy, it becomes difficult to protect information from illegal access when the people doing the protecting can't themselves access a lot of that information. Our style of law enforcement largely being reactive... as in punishing someone who violates the laws, as opposed to proactive in preventing crimes and violations of the laws to begin with. The thing is that with the new technologies this attitude, and our entire approach to law enforcement, doesn't nessicatly apply due to the fact that once a crime has been committed on the information front the damage is of a sort that is pretty much impossible to recover from. Add to it our rather tight limitations on what can be considered appropriate punishments, and you wind up with a situation where we have hackers running rampant, doing maasive amounts of damage, with little fear of the consequences due to the simple fact that the worst that is likely to happen is a slap on the wrist. Some kid costs a company billions or leads to a whole lot of people being victmized through their credit cards, it's not like the kid is going to be able to pay the damages (and the conceptual "everything he ever makes will go to the victims" doesn't work that way in reality, and atually wouldn't cover the damages anyway), and like most "white collar" crimes with little physical damage, the actual punishment in terms of prison time and the like is pretty light.
Like it or not law enforcement DOES need to adapt to this, and that involves re-examining some of the cornerstones of our legal system and the way we pursue and punish criminals, as well as how the law determines the severity of crimes. These kinds of changes are not something that can be done lightly, especially seeing as they are going to have far reaching implications throughout the entire legal system due to precedent. In the end, the buck has to stop somewhere, and someone has to be able to sit down and say "this is how it's going to be", with any desician made upsetting huge numbers of people in a nation like the USA since any kind of major change is going to be bad. Mccain is correct that we can't really have the goverment involved in it's typical "do nothing" posture, where it establishes multiple, balanced committees designed to stonewall each other so the goverment can make noise about looking into an isssue without ever actually doing anything (and thus preserving the careers of tveryone involved, since doing nothing tends to be less hurtful to a politician's career than doing anything due to the people that will complain and move against him).
In general conservatives DO tend to be against big goverment, but at the same time dealing with issues of national security, and law enforcement/public safety are things that the right wing generally agrees the goverment should be involved in. I think this is fairly consistant, especially for Mccain, since we're largely talking about adapting the system to modern times and issues, rather than giving the goverment more power per se. The goverment is already supposed to find, try, and punish criminals to protect society.
Why this is a nasty issue though, and has been being ignored, is because in the end this involves the goverment having to get pretty assertive, upset a lot of people, and throw a decent number of people in jail who probably wouldn't have been considered serious criminals right before the laws were passed. To some extent we already have the nessicary precedents in law, but certain things like "treason" are not popular in the US for... a lot of reasons. Yet when your dealing with the goverment aspect of things with hackers leaking information from classified diplomatic documents (which could affect the lives of millions of people through the operations of the goverment), or taking major hubs for national security and public safety like the CIA and FBI... well, as much as we might hate it, I think we're getting
into that ballpark, especially when your looking at things like "Wikileaks" where we have classified goverment data getting into the hands of foreign sources. On the private front, we have long needed a system that more effectively punishes "white collar criminals", with our system giving comparitive slaps on the wrist to non-violent crimes, no matter how much damage they might cause. People that run things like financial/real estate/corperate scams and the like need to be dealt with far more seriously than we're seeing now. I see private hacking as being in a similar catagory (and escaping for similar reasons) simply because a hacker doing millions or billions of dollars of damage just isn't taken as seriosly as someone who says breaks another person's kneecap with a sledgehammer, even if he does far more damage to far more people through their assets. Losing one's house, or having trouble affording food and medicine because someone scammed all your money away from you, or wrecked needed credit/equity/etc... by putting your identity on the internet is just as damaging to
those people. You hack a thousand people and cost them billions and it's considered less severe than if you say injured only a dozen people with a pipebomb. If nobody died from that pipebomb I'd say the hacker actually did more damage overall and would deserve a more severe penelty.
I'm NOT expecting everyone to agree with me here, and I'm not going into a lot of specifics for a reason, I'm just saying that I can't really laugh Mccain off.
I'll also say that I think addressing this properly will wind up involving nailing both hackers and the general run of white collar criminals at the same time, using broad strokes to up the ante for non-violent offenders, as well as making them easier to deal with as well. See, it occurs to me that if companies like Sony could be dealt with within the system when they rob their customers by doing things like removing the "other OS" system and the like, then there would be less people desiring to hack these companies, and thus less fallout hitting the general users when they go toe to toe. Especially with the recent trend towards hactivism, I think part of the problem is that the goverment isn't just having problems dealing with the hackers legally, but also the problems that are getting to the point where they are inspiring hackers to take action.
In the end though, nobody should expect a perfect solution.
I think in the end one thing people are going to have to deal with is the goverment having more of a free hand with it's own "wiretapping" abillity, and probably some reduction in what it takes to get a warrent. Before anyone starts bringing up a certain german group that was known for excesses with it's police force, understand that there is a middle ground between them and what we have now, as we see in countries like Canada where they have (or had) law enforcement activating with "blank warrents". I don't believe we should go as far as Canada did in general (from when it was being compared to the US system when I took criminal Justice), but especially with hacking when it comes to goverment reaction needing to be very quick to get/track these guys, I think we need less paperwork. All the laws in the world don't help if law enforcement has to fill out 36 forms in triplicate before it can do something, or take the time to bother some judge on the golf course for something that should take 30 seconds while the guy being chased gets further and further away and deeper and deeper into hiding (especially online). It's not a good thing, and a very delicate balancing act, which is why it has to be approached carefully (which is why Mccain still wants a commitee).
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Also as I've said before, I did vote for Mccain.
I'll also say that while I'm not a huge Sarah Palin fan, don't underestimate her. Like it or not she's a major political force, and through things like the "Tea Party" and her recent influance on elections your kind of seeing why they wanted her as a VP cantidate. Obviously if your extreme left wing you don't like her and what she stands for, but she's neither a joke or entirely irrelevent.
Honestly, I think Mccain largely lost the election due to people being POed with the party through Bush, and also from having turned into too much of a fence walker where he couldn't even rally a lot of the people who otherwise would have supported him.
Me, personally, I wanted Guiliani... continueing a genuine trend where the guy I'd want to vote for for president rarely makes it through the primaries. >
