White House calls crackers and script kiddies to public service

The recent spate of network attacks and the vulnerabilities it's revealed have certainly cast doubt on the soundness of grand, national schemes blindly embracing the Internet as a principal venue of trade and commerce. Nevertheless, America's highest-profile E-commerce booster, President Bill Clinton, remains stubbornly committed to the cause of force-fitting the Internet to accommodate schemes for which it was never designed, and to which it may never be comfortably adapted. "I don't think we have any way of measuring the contributions that the Internet is making and will continue to make, not only to the overall growth of the American economy, but to the range of individual opportunities open to people," the President enthused during an interview this week. He spoke of "a virtually unlimited number of new economic opportunities" which the Internet will bring forth. Clearly, the man is hopelessly seduced by his own Utopian rhetoric. But because the Net has shown itself to be a bit more dicey than hoped, he has scheduled a technology "summit" on Tuesday, bringing together "some people from the private sector and from our government team, to talk about what if anything else we can do about this." Clinton's immediate answer is to recruit young hackers for service as the Net's next generation of Establishment hall monitors. "We've got this, you know, this proposal for a cyber-academy to train young people to try to work to help us prevent illegal intrusions into the Internet and into important databases," the President explained. White House spokesman Joe Lockhart confirmed the scheme, saying at a Friday press conference that the President is involved in an effort "to sort of bring on bright young people and get them involved so that they're using their talents and energies for protecting the system rather than breaking into the system." The Register is firmly behind the goal of educating young people in the finer techniques of low-level network exploitation, and paying for it with public funds. Some graduates will no doubt end up working for security firms and anti-virus vendors, while others will take up arms in the continuing struggle which makes life so immensely profitable for the former group. A great way to stimulate the Internet economy we must allow. And you thought Clinton wasn't tech savvy.... ®