He sees you when you're surfin', he knows on what you click

By Andrea Shea King

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

When Benjamin Franklin said those words, he couldn't have known about the Internet. But his point, which has withstood the test of time, applies to any modern-day government that seeks to control us in the name of "security."

The latest example of the Obama administration's move to "secure us" is the "National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace", an innocuous title for a program that will identify us whenever we are online.

Obama and his administration officials are "enhancing online security and privacy and reducing and perhaps even eliminating the need to memorize a dozen passwords, through creation and use of more trusted digital identities."

But not to worry. Administration spokesmen assure us that they are not talking about a national ID card or a government-controlled system. And they stress that anonymity and pseudonymity will remain "possible" on the Internet.

Though details about the "trusted identity" project are scarce, we do know that the project will be enacted under the auspices of a national program office within the Commerce Department.

More on the Obama administration and the Internet: According to Jeffrey Anderson at The Weekly Standard, Obama et al are using your tax dollars to pay Google, Yahoo! and Bing so that when you search for "Obamacare" (and a whole host of other entries), the first listing that comes up (or the first listing after "Stories" on Yahoo!) is the administration's own health-care website, http://www.healthcare.gov/. It gushes about the "merits" of the highly unpopular health-care "reform."

"The administration apparently has no plans to stop using taxpayer money to promote Obamacare in this manner any time soon," Anderson writes.

Full story: He sees you when you're surfin', he knows on what you click