So we and the U.S. need your help to come up with a new one, or else the entire net will certainly face a total BSOD/Twitter fail-whale meltdown of epic proportions.

DHS wants to convince citizens to do something to fight online crime and hackers, and it thinks it needs a campaign along the lines of the memorable Smokey the Bear and Click It or Ticket campaigns.

The problem is it’s not clear at all what you are supposed to stop, think about or connect to. The tagline isn’t explained at all on the website, the downloadable PDF or the 15-slide PowerPoint presentation (nothing encourages cyber security like asking people to download a PowerPoint file). You can also become a “friend” of the campaign by submitting your email address here.

I’m scratching my head wondering what these imperatives are actually telling people to do.

Stop what? Downloading Powerpoint presentations from the web? Stop forwarding on chain e-mails? Stop using IE 6?

Think about what? I’m assuming the answer here is “the children”. We should always be thinking of “the children”.

Connect? To what? With whom? I’d guess the answer was “the children” again, but I’m pretty sure connecting with “the children” online is bad.

Personally, I would have gone with some like “Look left, look right, look left again before clicking a link.” It’s cheaper than a firewall and doesn’t require a monthly subscription.

Got a better slogan?

October is the National Cyber Security Awareness month, and the fed’s campaign to make computing safer needs a better slogan than Stop. Think. Connect., and we need your help. Submit your slogan below and/or vote up your favorites. We’ll close the poll at the end of the week, and submit the top ones to DHS.

Show slogans that are: hot | new | top-rated or submit your own slogan

Submit a Slogan

While you can submit as many slogans as you want, you can only submit one every 30 minutes. No HTML allowed.

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Authors: Ryan Singel

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