Things that are critical to national security should be able to defend themselves from botnets (most likely by firewalling themselves from the public Internet).

Things that are critical to national security should be able to defend themselves from botnets (most likely by firewalling themselves from the public Internet). I think these threats are vastly overstated, mostly by people trying to get more power in to the hands of the government. As for shutting down hosts involved in a bot net, a court order can do that in an emergency already. Sure, it adds a delay, but it also adds oversight and separates policy from mechanism. The executive branch controls the policy, while the courts control the mechanism.