There is a saying in the Information Security business: “The only way to be completely safe on the internet is to never get on it.”
Prior to being blessed to be the Assistant Senior Adult Pastor at my church, I retired from the Justice Department as an Information Security Officer, Compliance Officer, local National Crime Information Center Instructor/Coordinator and Network Administrator. As Sony recently learned, you can do everything right with your internet security policies and still get in a bind.
“Cyber Vandalism” is not new, but it is normally not conducted by a nation state in such an overt way. Multiply that by 100 million and that is how many “bad guys” are out there every day trying to get to your information. If I could get anything through to people it would be this one thing. Never ever click on a link you receive in an e-mail. You have no idea where it is really sending you. Do not believe an email if it tells you your bank account was compromised and they need you to reset your password.
We can look at all the heroes in the Bible who for the most part did everything right and were still persecuted. Job, Joseph, Daniel and many others come to mind. You can do everything right and still be attacked. There is a mindset to give up America’s control of the internet for “fairness and neutrality”. With the recent attack on Sony, one should be aware, the Pentagon, and many other high level government agencies as well as department stores have already had their systems compromised.
The least fair or neutral thing we could is to give up our ability to control internet content and access. There are roughly between 800,000,000 and one billion or so active web sites today. There has been some misinformation that half of them are pornography sites. An online Forbes article from 2011 did “some” research and crunched numbers to come up with a 5% to 10% number of “porn sites”. That still extrapolates to 50 – 100 MILLION. What do you think it would be if the internet went further into the shadows for the sake of not offending people because it seems too judgmental for one nation to have that much oversight?
The spiritual correlation is, we need to thank God that He is not “fair” with us and does not leave us to our own devices. He could easily say “Go ahead – pursue your own lusts…” and not pour out His conviction and grace upon us. We really do not want what we deserve. Most Christians know “The wages of sin is death – but the free gift of God is eternal life”. We deserve the former, but God loves us so much, He provides the latter.
Aren’t you glad God is active in our lives and not neutral? I want Him to control the content and access to things in my life, because I know it is for my own good and a better outcome. We need to beg Him to shine His light on us and not allow us to slide back into the shadows where we think we are getting away with some secret little sin. And remember, you are never really alone when you surf the web either.