If a flood swamped subway or commuter-rail tunnels, it could devastate an urban area’s buried electrical cables and foul up transportation for days or weeks. That’s not just some fantasy-based, apocalyptic scenario dreamed up to scare us: It actually happened. Twenty years ago, in Chicago, a small leak in an unused freight tunnel expanded beneath the city and started a flood, which eventually gushed through the entire tunnel system. A quarter-million people were evacuated from the buildings above, nearly $2 billion in damages accrued, and it took 6 weeks to pump the tunnels dry.

Is there a way to prevent such a disaster? They don’t make corks or bottle-stoppers that big. Or do they?  Building Blog reports that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s “Resilient Tunnel Project”

…has come up with a prototype 35,000-gallon “plug,” or “enormous inflatable cylinder,” in the words of PhysOrg.com, one that is “tunnel-shaped with rounded capsule-like ends” and “can be filled with water or air in minutes to seal off a section of tunnel before flooding gets out of control.”

The idea is to prevent underground floods from taking down whole subway systems or otherwise destroying subterranean logistical networks, such as telecom cables.

One of the companies that helped design and test the plug has many years of experience with puncture-proof materials: It designed space suits for NASA.

According to Homeland Security,

…the plug itself is made from tear-resistant fabrics—including liquid-crystal polymers—that can expand around irregular surfaces and objects, producing, in effect, an impassable blockade. The plug inflates (with water or air) to dimensions of roughly 32-feet-long and by 16-feet-wide, and holds 35,000 gallons, about the same capacity as a medium-sized backyard swimming pool. When not in use, the plug packs down to a small storage space in the tunnel, ready for remote, immediate inflation in an emergency from the tunnel system’s command center.

I realize that this is not the typical political story that one generally finds here at Occasional Planet. It is, however, a story about knowledge-based, creative problem-solving and imagination at work for the common good of our country—activities worthy of emulation by today’s cohort of Congressional politicians, whose tunnel vision [yes, pun intended] extends only as far as the next election.

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You’ve heard about the chaos in Egypt. Ordinary citizens got tired of their oppressive ruler and took to the streets. There are tanks in Cairo, riots, mandatory curfews, and most surprisingly, no internet. It’s a terrifying thought; the idea that with a handful of phone calls the government is able to shut off internet and cell phone services for a country with 80 million people. (In Egypt only 20% of people have access to the internet through a home computer but 75% have cell phones.) The question isn’t why Egypt halted the internet, but why the United States is considering legislation to allow for the same thing to happen here.

For the second time a bill is being brought before Congress that gives the President power over privately owned computer systems during a “national cyberemergency” and prohibiting any review by the court system.

According to CNET:

“The revised Lieberman-Collins bill, dubbed the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, works this way: Homeland Security will “establish and maintain a list of systems or assets that constitute covered critical infrastructure” and that will be subject to emergency decrees.

Under the revised legislation, the definition of critical infrastructure has been tightened. DHS is only supposed to place a computer system (including a server, Web site, router, and so on) on the list if it meets three requirements. First, the disruption of the system could cause “severe economic consequences” or worse. Second, that the system “is a component of the national information infrastructure.” Third, that the “national information infrastructure is essential to the reliable operation of the system.”

President Obama would then have the power to “issue a declaration of a national cyberemergency.” What that entails is a little unclear, including whether DHS could pry user information out of Internet companies that it would not normally be entitled to obtain without a court order. One section says they can disclose certain types of noncommunications data if “specifically authorized by law,” but a presidential decree may suffice.

Senator Susan Collins, the author of the bill, claims that it isn’t “kill switch” legislation like what happened in Egypt. But with the vague definition of “cyberemergency” and “critical infrastructure” it can be justification for anything. All the president has to do is declare cyberemergency and he could shut down Google, Yahoo, and Hotmail, effectively halting all email. For however long he wanted.

The ACLU, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Center for Democracy and Technology, and numerous other groups think that it will be a tool for censorship. (The bill is co-sponsored by Sen. Joe Lieberman. He’s said before that it’s okay to pressure companies about internet content.) Once the bill gets revised and resubmitted it should be interesting to see where public supports lies.

The idea behind the bill is nothing new. Internet censorship/restriction is a hallmark of non-freedom loving countries. China blocks Google, Iran has censored social media sites in times of unrest, and all websites are under government control in North Korea. Are those really countries we want to use as role models for our internet policies?

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On March 4^th, Senators McCain and Lieberman quietly introduced a bill that Salon Magazine’s Glen Greenwald calls “the single most extremist, tyrannical and dangerous bill introduced in the Senate in the last several decades, far beyond the horrific, habeas-abolishing Military Commissions Act.”

It is senate bill S.3081, the “Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010,” which now has nine sponsors including newly elected Senator Scott Brown.

This bill appears to be Senators McCain and Lieberman’s response to President Obama choosing to have the Christmas “underwear bomber,” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, tried in civilian courts. And, according to Greenwald, it is also “designed to formally authorize what the Bush administration did to U.S. citizen Jose Padilla—arrest him on U.S. soil and imprison him for years in military custody with no charges.”

This bill grants the president the power to order, arrest, interrogate and imprison anyone—including U.S. citizens—considered to be a “suspected belligerent” or a “high value detainee.” According to the bill, a person is considered a “high value detainee” if he/she fulfills one of the following criteria:

(1) poses a threat of an attack on civilians or civilian facilities within the U.S. or U.S. facilities abroad; (2) poses a threat to U.S. military personnel or U.S. military facilities; (3) potential intelligence value; (4) is a member of al Qaeda or a terrorist group affiliated with al Qaeda, or (5) such other matters as the President considers appropriate.

In other words, an individual doesn’t even have to pose a threat to be picked up, detained and interrogated by the military. Individuals can merely be determined to be of “potential intelligence value” or come under the vague mandate of “such other matters as the President considers appropriate.” After the arrest, “The High-Value Detainee Interrogation Team must make a preliminary determination whether the detainee is an unprivileged enemy belligerent, within 48 hours of taking detainee into custody.” The final determination of whether or not the person is an “unprivileged enemy belligerent” is made by the Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General. And then, the so-called unprivileged enemy belligerent can be held indefinitely in military custody.

Liliana Segura, writing at Alternet, says  “This is a defining characteristic of a military dictatorship. Where’s the outrage?”

The ACLU has expressed its vigorous opposition to the legislation, labeling it nothing less than a “direct attack on the Constitution.” “Indefinite detention flies in the face of American values and violates this country’s commitment to the rule of law,” states Laura W. Murphy, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office.

The frightening aspect of this bill, besides the fact that it shreds the Constitution, is that it gives the president and the military the power to turn the “war on terror” against politically active American citizens who may express dissent against the policies of the government.

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