by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
I consider myself an independent moderate liberal and generally I wouldn’t even think of supporting something as draconian as a PIN for individual use of the Internet, and yet it seems as though the time has come to have that debate.
The reason is simple –the Russians are fucking with us.
A case could be made that you could appease both the Left and the Right in the United States by establishing a nationwide Internet PIN system. It would be like a driver’s license for the Information Superhighway, to date myself with a metaphor.
It would be very basic — you simply would have to establish that you were a real fucking American citizen to use the American Internet. That’s it.
Now, I’m the first to say doing something like this is ripe for abuse on any number of different levels. And, yet, given how important the Internet is in our political system (see also Donald J. Trump) maybe the only way to throw things back into whack is to do something really incredibly draconian and crazy.
The Right would be able to crow about how terrorists who used the Internet for nefarious reasons could be tracked down and the Left could sigh a huge sigh of relief that fucking Russian trolls weren’t throwing the fucking presidential election and electing incompetnent Right Wing celebrity Twitter trolls.
And, yet, such a PIN system would likely be instantly abused so badly as to make it something we would regret the moment existed.
But I’m desperate. Really desperate.
I want my country back.
