Lessig and i9/11

I spent some time on Friday with Larry Lessig, who is one of the internet’s great thinkers. He’s probably best known for his work on intellectual property and for his backing of movements like Creative Commons. I was most interested in talking with him about the disconnect between Silicon Valley and Washington, but that subject morphed into a larger discussion about what will happen when our nation sees its first widescale digital attack.
The question, of course, is not if but when. As Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain pointed out during their speech at Google here in Washington on Thursday, there’s no particularly good reason why the U.S. has not yet a major terrorist attack online already and so the question is really more: “Why not?” Luck appears to be the answer so far.
Zittrain (who is the only web-lebrity famous enough to be known by a single letter: “Z”) and Lessig rightly pointed out that the 9/11 Patriot Act, which passed in such haste after the terrorist attacks, had been long sitting in a drawer at the Justice Department waiting for just such an occasion. There’s no way such a major piece of legislation could have been written so quickly. Richard Clarke, a former national counterterrorism official best known for writing “Against All Enemies,” has said that there is a similar document waiting in a drawer for the first digital attack. Lessig calls it the “i9/11 Patriot Act.” After that attack