As a call to arms goes out to prepare for cyberterrorism, we now know at least a few ways vital U.S. infrastructure can be shut down. There are errant construction crews and maintenance screw ups. Lights out San Francisco!
Looking ahead a bit, Y2K could slow our caffeinated pace (stock up on champagne and caviar).
But, as the Capitol Hill crowd discovered last week, presidential impeachment is one sure-fire way to bring things to a screeching halt.
Highly acclaimed electronic democracy, manifested in a flood of e-mails and telephone calls to Congress from citizens voicing opinions on the impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton, crashed the system last week.
Thomas, the virtual Congress named for our third president, OD’ed on e-democracy.
Late last Monday, just days before the scheduled impeachment vote, the House server registered 520,000 e-mails-substantially more than the 80,000 digital notes dashed off in a normal day. The 14,000 daily telephone calls usually received by the Capitol switchboard doubled. Even Western Union was pressed into action. Remember telegrams?
Pagers and mobile phones no doubt occupied a good chunk of the airwaves as well.
In truth, a lot of this e-democracy was orchestrated by People for the American Way via phone banks in four cities that produced anti-impeachment calls to Congress.
My, how times have changed since the Nixonian days of Watergate when subterfuge was expressed in cash-filled envelopes and a duct tape-aided botched DNC break-in. That was before e-commerce and computer hacking came in vogue.
Then, Woodward and Bernstein followed the money to expose a cancerous presidency. Now, a self-proclaimed e-reporter named Matt Drudge in a Los Angeles apartment complements an all-powerful independent counsel who follows the DNA to take down Clinton.
As Kenneth Starr unravels genetic code, a recklessly literate president reconfigures the molecular structure of words and sentences so as to obliterate all meaning of the English language. So as to deceive.
Headlines in the ’round-the-clock news cycle are on Web sites long before they appear on front pages in news print.
Then, Watergate TV-as dramatic as it was dull-brought endless days of studied, methodic interrogation of witnesses by Democrats and Republicans joined in purpose. The TV has been supplanted by the Net-mega-data dumps of the Starr report.
In hopes of giving l’affaire Monica a Watergate-like feel, the GOP-led House Judiciary Committee commanded expert testimony from convicted perjurers and scholars with varying constitutional convictions-all before Dem and GOP lawmakers who pledge allegiance to party colors over the American flag.
Thus, in so many ways, the 0’s and 1’s of the digital age have changed the face of impeachment. It’s an American tragedy just the same.
