You'd think that politics has nothing to do with cybersecurity, but it does. You can often guess a person's political leanings by their opinions on cybersecurity.
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For example, I'm a Libertarian. Because of this, I oppose concepts like "defense in depth". I claim that "the Internet is secure enough", and that "cybersecurity is a tradeoff". These things just flow unsurprisingly from the Libertarian way of looking at the world.
Therefore, I assumed McCain would be better than Obama at helping cybersecurity regulation. McCain talked about the old nasty telcoms regulation that stifled early Internet growth. He demonstrated understanding of the way laws killed innovation,. even though he didn't understand the Internet itself. Conversely, Obama preached how government was going to change the Internet for the better. I think think government can do little to make the Internet better, but can inadvertently do much to make things much worse, so I endorsed McCain. A fatuous thing to do, of course, but since Google endorsed Obama, I went ahead with it.
But the reverse happened. Obama has been largely "hands-off" on the Internet, letting the DHS, NSA, and DoD fight their turf war to see who'd get control of cyberspace. Meanwhile, McCain has been pushing exactly the sort of legislation I feared most, such as his recently introduced cybersecurity bill, described by some as "Orwellian" the way it gives government control over the Internet. McCain was also one of the chief sponsors of the NDAA amendment that authorizes the president to suspend habeas corpus (not precisely cybersec related, but something every cybersec person I know opposes). [My libertarian friends chide me, pointing out that McCains attacks on free-speech in the past demonstrated that he didn't really believe in civil liberties, so that I should've known.]
So I was wrong about McCain, so very very wrong.
