On Tuesday in the USA we’re having an election. The way the system was originally designed was that the officials we elected were supposed to represent our common public interests. I’m not entirely certain the dynamic is completely in effect these days; because of gerrymandering [voters used to pick their politicians but now politicians pick their voters], because of absence of term limits & absence age limits, and because of rampant insider trading [they may start off middle class but they don’t stay that way for long], much of the U.S. Congress seems to have turned into a set self-licking ice cream cones looking after their own interests more then their supporters’. Anyway, let’s give our politicians some clear guidance this year. “Don’t ask, don’t get,” as they say.

So, this AI thing is really happening –faster than anything else ever has– and it’s changing everything on the Internet whether we like it or not. None of us little people have a say in it, or the ability if we wanted to, to opt out. So, if we’re stuck taking the bad with the good, here’s my proposal to try to get some more good to serve our interests.

I propose what our elected leaders accomplish right away would be to fix this problem of cyber thieves from other countries entering into our countrymen’s and countrywomen’s laptops and stealing our identities, stealing our savings, locking out our hospital systems, etc. We possess enough home-grown thieves already, thank-you-very-much.

It seems like a reasonable ask, to me. I’ll even (although not a cyber person in the slightest) suggest how it could be accomplished: use this new, supposedly all-powerful super-duper AI capability to block it.

If I want to go to Australia, or even next door to Canada or Mexico, I need a passport. It has a number and a photo, and it’s verified and unique. At the airport they look at my passport, scan it into their computer, ask some questions and say “yes” or “no.” If I want to go there and stay a while, I need a Visa. I arrange that through the Embassy.

Why can’t we have an analogous kind of system for cyberspace? If someone from say, Russia, wants to reach into my laptop, why can’t they be blocked until their identity can be verified, and a responsible service can flag it and say, “Paul, this gentleman from overseas would like to send you an email with an embedded link. Do you wish to accept this email?” Why are there no enforced governmental rules for this and instead we’re left on our own, here? These thieves are pro’s, and what do we get? We get admonitions not to get tricked. And it’s a big problem!

We humans as a species can do all kinds of difficult things; I’m guessing this could be one of them. And if it’s hard to do, that in my mind would be an appropriate application of AI technology. I’m betting that it’s good at just such type of problem. If we want to drive on the roads, we must have a valid Driver’s License and insurance; if we want to drive on the cyberhighways, we don’t. Why? Who benefits from such anonymity? Thieves do. Trolls do. Pedophiles do. Probably the billionaires who own the Tech companies don’t want to spend any of their billions on solving this problem, do.

China and Russia have national firewalls but that comes at tremendous authoritarian costs to their society. In “the West,” we prioritize [correctly] individual freedoms and we are more open, but it’s leaving us vulnerable to the better-prepared cyber criminals. Is there a potential that AI could be used to create personal firewalls for US individuals and businesses?

I asked the above to my personal AI service called “Cursor.” Cursor wrote back: It’s a genuinely good analogy, Paul, and the fact that it feels like it should work tells you something important about where the real problem lies. Let me walk through why cyberspace doesn’t have passports — and then why your instinct about AI is actually right.

Why the passport model breaks down online

The physical world has properties the internet was never built to have:

• A single chokepoint. To enter Australia, your body must pass through an airport. There’s one door, staffed by one government, and you can’t be in two places at once. On the internet there is no door. A packet from Russia doesn’t “arrive at a border” — it hops through a dozen networks owned by different companies in different countries, and the final hop into your laptop looks identical to a packet from your neighbor.
• Identity is tied to a physical person. Your passport works because there’s exactly one of you, and a government vouched for that. Online, the fundamental unit isn’t a person — it’s a packet of data with a claimed return address that is trivial to forge. There is no global authority that issues “internet passports,” and the ones who’ve tried (China, Russia) do it precisely by building the national firewall you mentioned.
• The original sin of the design. The internet’s core protocols were designed in the 1970s–80s among a small group of trusting researchers. Identity and security were simply left out — bolted on later as an afterthought (that’s what HTTPS, the little padlock, is). We are, in a real sense, still living with a system whose foundation assumed everyone was friendly.

So you’re not missing something obvious. There is genuinely no “embassy for cyberspace,” and the reasons are architectural, not just political laziness.

What actually does exist (and why it’s weaker than a passport)

• Certificates verify websites (“this really is your bank”), but not the humans sending you email.
• Spam filters and reputation systems (Gmail, corporate email gateways) already do a crude version of your “do you wish to accept this?” — they quietly block billions of bad messages. They’re just invisible and imperfect.
• Corporate/government networks do have the guarded-border model — a security team, a firewall, monitored gateways. That’s exactly why big institutions get breached less often per-capita than individuals. Your intuition is right: the problem is that ordinary people and small businesses have no security team. You personally are expected to be your own border guard, and that’s unreasonable.

Where AI genuinely changes the picture — and your instinct is correct

Here’s the hopeful part. The reason we’ve historically only had “admonitions not to get tricked” is that real-time, personalized judgment didn’t scale. You couldn’t hire a security analyst to sit on every grandmother’s laptop. AI is the first technology that plausibly can. What it could realistically provide:

1. A personal analyst, per person. An AI layer that inspects an incoming email and tells you, in plain language: “This claims to be from your bank, but it was sent from a server registered three days ago in a region your bank doesn’t use, and the link redirects through two other sites. I’d treat this as a scam.” That’s your embassy official — not verifying a passport, but giving you the informed judgment you currently lack.
2. Behavioral “visas.” Rather than verifying identity (which is hard), AI is very good at spotting behavior that doesn’t fit. A login from your usual laptop at 9am is fine; the same credentials from overseas moving money at 3am gets challenged. Banks already do a primitive version; AI makes it far sharper and extends it to everyone.
3. Catching the novel attacks. Old filters match known-bad lists. AI can flag a scam it has never seen before because it reasons about intent — which matters now that criminals use AI to write flawless, personalized phishing. This is increasingly an AI-vs-AI contest, and the defender who opts out loses.
4. Leveling the field for small business. This is the biggest near-term win. The “enterprise security team” experience — monitoring, triage, plain-English alerts — is exactly the kind of expertise AI can package cheaply. That directly addresses the gap you named between well-defended institutions and defenseless individuals.

The honest limits (so this isn’t a sales pitch)

• Attackers get the same AI. This raises the floor for everyone but doesn’t end the war; it escalates it.
• The China tradeoff is real. A true “verify every identity at the border” system requires someone who controls the border and sees everyone’s traffic — which is the surveillance cost you correctly flagged. The Western version has to work by judgment and consent at the edges (your device) rather than control at the center, which is harder but preserves openness. Your “do you wish to accept this?” framing is actually the right model precisely because it keeps you, not a government, as the decision-maker.
• False alarms erode trust. A guard who blocks your friends becomes a guard you switch off.

Bottom line

You’ve essentially described “security as a personal service rather than personal responsibility,” and that’s not a fantasy — it’s where the industry is heading, and AI is the specific thing that makes it economically possible for the first time. The passport-at-the-border version isn’t coming to the open internet without the authoritarian costs you noted. But a per-person, consent-based AI “advisor at your edge” — one that evaluates the stranger and asks before letting them in — is both technically plausible and, in early forms, already being built.

Your frustration is well-placed. The current “don’t get tricked” advice amounts to telling untrained civilians to win a fight against professionals. The real fix isn’t better warnings — it’s giving every person their own expert. That expert is now buildable.

Want me to sketch what such a tool would concretely look like — say, an AI “inbox bouncer” that screens email and explains its reasoning before you click? I could even build a working demo of the idea.

So [we’re back to me typing now, not Cursor], it seems as if it should be do-able. The Internet, when originally designed in / around San Francisco in was it the 70’s, was local to a few trusted researchers. It’s no longer that way, and it now needs an evolutionary revision. (Our Constitution, drafted 250 years ago, could probably use some revisions at this point as well / i.e. new Amendments, for the same kids of reasons). Instead of the Internet serving as a service who’s secret function is to print money for a few Tech-bros, we need the U.S. Government to regulate it a bit (no hyperventilating: that’s what Governments are there to do, to regulate), and demand that it find a way to protect its users better than it currently does. If our physical highways had no rules, things would be a mess. If we had no borders –touchy subject, I know– but of course we must have borders, and if we didn’t have clear policies for them (= another subject that Congress has been delaying action on for decades) we’d be fighting a lot about those, wouldn’t we? We need this new Congress do fix this issue right away. If you agree, write your Congressman!