Domestic spying
He authorizes them to monitor the internet. i.e. he's authorized the NSA, an agency riddled with political appointees, to intercept domestic internet traffic prior to an election.
And the government agencies, they're to be concentrated into 50 connections to the net. It makes them more vulnerable by by creating bottlenecks, but it happens to also make them easier to monitor for leaks.
The 'cyber' attack stuff is rubbish, a DDOS isn't a strike from a government to another government. Nobody cares if the FBI's website goes down, because only the FBI's admin bothers to read it.
Nobody care's if someone DDOS's a powerstations *website*, because only an idiot thinks that the network controlling the powerstation and the one running the website is the same thing.
"The Pentagon can plan attacks on adversaries' networks if, for example, the NSA determines that a particular server in a foreign country needs to be taken down to disrupt an attack on an information system critical to the U.S. government. That could include responding to an attack against a private-sector network, such as the telecom industry's, sources said."
Or they could bar the IP address on their own servers, if they enabled the auto features in Linux, it would automatically bar bandwidth hogs. Since these features are built into the OS.
But shockingly even if they didn't do that, the Whitehouse.gov web server goes down, the world still moves on, the President doesn't hop in his jet to feel safe and nobody notices. It's just a website.
"There has been a string of attacks on networks at the State, Commerce, Defense and Homeland Security departments in the past year and a half. U.S. officials and cyber-security experts have said Chinese Web sites were involved in several of the biggest attacks back to 2005, including some at the country's nuclear-energy labs and large defense contractors."
Attacking what? Their websites? If it was critical systems they wouldn't have it internet facing, so it's not a critical system.
"cyber-security experts have said Chinese Web SITES were involved"
Web SITES? You see? They even think the website of www.mysite.cn is the same computer as the machine polling their websites. As though an attacker advertises themselves by running Apache and putting up a site on the same machine doing the attack.
No, this is rubbish, it's just an excuse to let the NSA monitor the US internet.