iPatriot Act

Lawrence Lessig warns of a "i-9/11 event" (which doesn't mean an Al Qaeda event, just a catastrophe on the internet that has the scale of the 9/11 terrorist attacks) during Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference. This event, suggests Lessig, is what the government is waiting for in order to push through Congress an already drafted "iPartiot Act" to regulate the internet.

Today, CNN reports that there's a major security flaw in the way that the internet operates. The security flaw tricks a computer into visiting a phony dupilcate of a legitimate site, which could be used for various nefarious purposes. One such scam has already taken place:

[C]riminals have pulled off at least one successful attack, directing some AT&T Inc. Internet customers in Texas to a fake Google site. The phony page was accompanied by three programs that automatically clicked on ads, with the profits for those clicks flowing back to the hackers.

Could this "i-9/11" be just around the corner? I fear what an "iPatriot Act" might do to the model of free-flowing information that drives the internet.