This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, May 24th, 2011. I'm Caleb Brown.

The President has outlined his own cyber security plan.

It's better than the ones floating around on Capitol Hill, says Jim Harper,

Director of Information Policy Studies at the Cato Institute.

Unfortunately, says Harper, better is not good.

The administration's plan is its first affirmative proposal.

It came out nearly two years ago with a cyber security strategy that dealt in generalities with the question of cyber security

I won't go through the details of the plan because in a sense the details are unimportant but it's part of a back and forth

between the Congress and now the administration on what our nation's cybersecurity

policies should be. I suppose the upshot is that the administration's plan is better along a number

of vectors than what we've seen so far in Congress, but that doesn't necessarily make the plan good.

One of the improvements, true improvements in the bill is that it doesn't have what's been called the

kill switch provision.

The Senate has over two Congresses now had a proposal to give the president authority to take

command or control of the internet in some way. All this is very ambiguously

defined and that's been dubbed the kill switch and appropriately so because if not outright

killing the internet it would certainly damage the internet and cause a lot of problems for

communicators.

If the issue here is, as the president and others have described it as a mass disruption

that would be caused by someone, wouldn't a kill switch provision that's been offered by Congress be, if not as bad, worse than something that some group might be able to orchestrate?

That's exactly the problem with the debate so far.

The president was constrained, and I think that's the appropriate way to put it.

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