I think you're wrong for a variety of reasons about how many people will die if the entire Internet becomes unavailable to North America for weeks at a time.

Maybe, but I'm willing to bet it's a very small number compared to how many could die if the electrical power grid went down or land line telephones or the water system. We didn't give up privacy and freedoms to protect those systems, why would we give them up for the internet?

Actually, that's precisely the issue. If the entire internet goes down, it will start to impact things like the power grid and the water systems. Every year, utility companies put more and more of their infrastructure behind increasingly clever management infrastructure, and control it over the open internet. Hopefully none of it will fail-unsafe (though I bet something will), but if the management systems are offline for weeks?

And it will immediately, although not fatally, impact land line telephones, which I believe do significant backhaul over IP.

I'd imagine that taking a laptop to the control server and plugging in an ethernet cable would suffice to access the control panels if the internet is down.

Okay, I give up. Why is sacrificing privacy and freedoms a necessary condition of protecting the electrical power grid, land line telephones, or the water system?

I don't think it is. Just like I don't think it's required to give it up to protect the internet.

> Electronic warfare is not on the same level as real warfare. Nobody will die if the internet is down for a few weeks.

The economic devastation would be huge. Banks could not process payments, utilities could not be managed in some areas, software companies would basically lose all productivity.

Heck even many hospitals would be unable to access medical records.

There would be serious wide spread repercussions that would leave a lasting impact on, if nothing else, our economy.

What about the Chinese government having access to US govt systems for several years without anyone knowing? Could leaking nuclear, space, or strategic plans to a foreign government hurt anyone? Yes. All of a sudden the plans for bombs and ships we've spent billions to develop are handed over and free to use. That's not a good thing.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-07/chinese-cyber-spyin...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_bomb

and of course:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet

What about it? How will recording and data mining text messages fix that problem?

Furthermore, if the government has already screwed up their systems and made them publicly available in the first place, how can you be so sure they'll competently implement their surveillance systems?

Because for every spy program we know about, how many are out there that we don't know about?

Will an infinite number of spy programs solve the problem of the government putting critical infrastructure on the internet?

Just because you only use the internet to watch cat videos doesn't mean there isn't critical infrastructure that depends on the continued functioning of the internet.

Critical infrastructure shouldn't be connected to the public internet. Obviously some of it is, but I don't see how surveillance and spying on citizens is going to fix it.