Resurfaced comments in which new House Speaker Mike Johnson talked about how he and his son monitor each other’s online activity using “accountability software” have raised questions about national security.
Johnson, a Republican who was first elected to Congress in 2016, spoke in 2022 about how he installed software called Covenant Eyes on his devices during a panel called “War on Technology” at Cypress Baptist Church in Benton, Louisiana, Rolling Stone reported.
According to a clip first posted on X, formerly Twitter, by a user called Receipt Maven, Johnson spoke about how the subscription-based service helps people abstain from internet porn and “objectionable” websites.
No doubt, the national security risk from something like this is pretty significant. IIRC, Covenant Eyes is basically a rootkit that you voluntarily install and you can get around it by booting from USB.
Many fundamentalists take a lot of pride in being Luddites. Knowing too much about computers and the internet can be ‘Worldly’. Church networks are often wide open and church computers are frequently infected. Leadership roles in fundy churches - as low as Sunday School teacher - can come with an email address and instead of using webmail, members will install add-ridden software given by the webhosting company of their website. There are companies that specialize in providing webhost and associated services to fundie churches.
There’s an entire cottage industry of ‘Christian’ software and computer services. You know they’re good people because they have a fish symbol on their homepage and some bible crap in their about section.
The exploits write themselves.
Yeah I was in a catholic school, so all this sounds really on brand.