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I never made it through a whole Clancy novel, but I think I grasp the basic formula anyway: a bunch of factual background + some more-or-less plausible speculation + a chain of innocent-seeming coincidences = a thriller. Clancy, obviously, is hawkish, implicitly conservative, explicitly technophilic.

This is an idea for a techno/political thriller rooted in somewhat different political beliefs:

In the near-future, the United States has become an plutocracy — a state controlled by the rich — in all but name. A neocon administration holds the executive office and congress by a slim majority based on its enduring, if phony, populist appeal. Policy, meanwhile, is dictated almost entirely by the corporate concerns the elected officials serve.

It is growing harder for the spin doctors to put a rosy face on the state of the union. A series of environmental disasters has pummelled the nation: hurricanes, failing crops, droughts. Spiking fuel prices have rippled through the economy and unemployment is at a near-record high. The threat of terrorism is unabated, but no longer galvanizes public opinion for the administration as it did at the dawn of the new century. The terrorists ignore what Homeland Security defends with manpower and technology, and find a new target category with each strike. But people are too exhausted to be panicked. Living with fear has become the norm.

As an election year approaches, the neocons are slipping badly in the polls. Their loss seems certain. An elite group of party leaders formulates a daring plan to keep themselves in power.

Their plan relies on a convergence of events dating back to the end of the previous century:

• As early as the mid-90’s, when the “Communications Decency Act” was introduced, some policy makers had realized that free exchange of information over the Internet posed a potential threat to both corporate and governmental interests. By the turn of the century, media companies were arguing that they would be bankrupted by unauthorized distribution of their products over the Internet.
• Meanwhile, the administration was fighting a new kind of journalism. It no longer mattered if a news outlet or an official transcript retroactively omitted an embarassing remark or error of fact, because any slip was instantly archived on hundreds of political web sites run by private citizens. (In fact, exposing attempts by the administration to quash its faux pas became cause celèbres.)
• The Internet had been conceived, in the height of Cold War paranoia, as a network that would continue to function no matter how many cities were blown up. How could the dissemination of undesirable information on such a widely distributed network be prevented?

  In 1998, the media companies won a major battle with the enactment of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which, in the controversial “Section 1201,” criminalized attempts to defeat copy-protection. But by 2005, legislation to bolster Hollywood — like the so-called “Broadcast Flag” — had lost traction with the public, and was being widely opposed by grassroots collectives of ‘net activists. The administration abruptly switched its focus toward the distribution of obscenity — material that few would care to defend.

  The administration was presented with a rare attempt to pack the Supreme Court with judges loyal to the neocon cause in the face of free-speech challenges. The Justice Department issued a clarification of legislation restricting the operation of adult entertainment businesses on the Internet that made full compliance with the law practically impossible. Simultaneously, the judical branch launched a campaign to redefine and broaden the legal definition of obscenity. A few liberals whined about “slippery slopes,” but, for the most part, reason prevailed. After all, any voter on the Internet was being bombarded with unwanted commercial solicitations for businesses they were only too happy to help shut down.

• That same year, the “USA PATRIOT and Terrorism Prevention Reauthorization Act of 2005″ granted the federal government an unprecedented power: to detain people without judicial process, and to make the detainment itself a state secret. There was a compelling argument in favor of this: if a member of an active terrorist cell was identified and detained, it was vital for intelligence operations that other members of that cell not be alerted. But the act made it possible for the US government to “disappear” citizens just as the Argentian dictatorship had done in the 80’s.
• By 200? the judicial branch faced a serious enforcement problem: vast quantities of material now definitively classed as illegal were still circulating over the Internet, and the Internet’s nasty new cousin, the DarkNet. The DarkNet used encryption to foil the attempts of lawful communications providers to control traffic on their networks. The judicial branch argued persuasively that there was only one way to stem the tide, and identify and prosecute lawbreakers:

  Every file transmitted — every webpage, every email, every picture, every audio clip — would need to include a digital signature identifying its creator. Any lawful software would refuse to open an unsigned file, or a file with a signature flagged as invalid. Removing or forging a signature would be a felony.

• The technical capability to control the flow of information this way — under the general names of “Trusted Computing” and “Document Rights Management” — had actually been built into software (such as Microsoft Office 2003, Windows Media Player version 9, and Adobe Acrobat Reader version 6) since 2003, and into computer hardware (such as BIOS chips produced by American Megatrends) since 2004. By 200? it was implemented in every microprocessor produced by a major manufacturer, and embedded in most application programs and operating systems.
• In 200?, the controversial RIGHTEOUS Act narrowly passed the House and Senate and was signed into law by the President. The act made it a felony to use or distribute software or hardware that did not use Trusted Computing protocols, or that did not provide a “backdoor” for authorized officials of the justice department to bypass any user encryption or protection. Attempts by malcontents such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation to challenge the act on First Amendment grounds met with failure.

The stage was now set for the neocons’ preemptive strike against their opposition in the coming election.

The spin doctors would manufacture a new terrorist threat so severe and pervasive that a declaration of martial law — and suspension of the election — was called for.

Attempts to undermine the credibility of the administration’s intelligence information about the threat could themselves be defined as terrorist actions, or even sedition.

Citizen’s permission to access any information circulated by dissidents could be revoked, and the dissidents themselves could quietly be removed under the terms of the USA PATRIOT Act.

The neocons’ control of all three branches of goverment for the indefinite future would be assured.

And those whose goal had all along been the destruction of the American way of live, the erosion of the values for which the United States had stood? They would be victorious.

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