What do you do when a computer has been hijacked by a virus? Take it to professionals for cleaning? Sure. Secure your network? Absolutely. Extract your data or fall back to backed up data, check it carefully, and then erase your computer and install software fresh? In an extreme case, that could be necessary.

However the technological terror that is the Obama administration had a different idea, when the Economic Development Administration’s terribly insecure systems were infected with run-of-the-mill viruses. These alleged geniuses who are supposed to be everything in technology that Republicans are not literally blew their budget destroying hardware, including mice and printers, as a response to the viruses.

And these people want massive regulatory powers over all American computers, in the name of cybersecurity.

Quoth Ars Technica:

The agency demonstrated serious technical misunderstandings—it shut down its e-mail servers because some of the e-mails on the servers contained malware, even though this posed no risk to the servers themselves—and a general sense of alarmism.

The malware that was found was common stuff. There were no signs of persistent, novel infections, nor any indications that the perpetrators were nation-states rather than common-or-garden untargeted criminal attacks. The audit does, however, note that the EDA’s IT infrastructure was so badly managed and insecure that no attacker would need sophisticated attacks to compromise the agency’s systems.

Alarmism. The Obama administration is making decisions on the basis of ignorant alarmism. If this is happening here, where else is it happening? If this is how they do the business of securing systems, then how can we trust them in this at all? This is why CISPA, a low-regulatory approach, was vastly preferable to the Democrat alternative bills on cybersecurity that have been put forward in the past by Jay Rockefeller and Joe Lieberman.

We must not empower these people over the Internet if we can help it, and we can.