An Internet "Kill Switch?"

[uscitizen]

They become more scared of us everyday....especially when we can retrieve information and news instantly now.

LOL, yeah if you call what we get news.

If you're speaking about cable/network news, yeah that's a carnival. Haven't watched that junk in 10 years. It's not difficult to research news on the internet though.

Nope network stuff.
Much of it is so incomplete as to be useless and much is downright wrong.
And much of the rest is so politically slanted as to perhaps be worse than useless.

 

[Foxfyre]

That's a tall order though. Once the three main networks: NBC, CBS, and ABC, lost their monopolistic ability to control the national message, communications has become almost as diverse as our demographics.

In order to silence communications they would have to:

1. Jam satellite communications
2. Shut down all cell phone companies including calls and text messaging.
3. They would have to shut down all the cable companies.
4. They would have to silence all radio stations.
5. They would have to disable all public telephone service.
6. And they would have to shut down the internet.

Once they did that, we have a totalitarian government that, unless the military became sufficiently alarmed to oppose it, would never have to restore any freedoms it did not deem wise to let us have.

Carrier pigeons, Paul Revere style rides, and smoke signals wouldn't be fast enough to be totally useful.

 

[Foxfyre]

But let's assume Lieberman et al has a valid point. Can anybody think of a scenario in which the government might have to shut down a particular interent service or whatever in the interest of national security?

 

[shintao]

That's a tall order though. Once the three main networks: NBC, CBS, and ABC, lost their monopolistic ability to control the national message, communications has become almost as diverse as our demographics.

In order to silence communications they would have to:

1. Jam satellite communications
2. Shut down all cell phone companies including calls and text messaging.
3. They would have to shut down all the cable companies.
4. They would have to silence all radio stations.
5. They would have to disable all public telephone service.
6. And they would have to shut down the internet.

Once they did that, we have a totalitarian government that, unless the military became sufficiently alarmed to oppose it, would never have to restore any freedoms it did not deem wise to let us have.

Carrier pigeons, Paul Revere style rides, and smoke signals wouldn't be fast enough to be totally useful.

Ham radios. They can never shut us down. AM/FM radios. During the Iraq war you could listen to reports coming out of Baghdad.

 

[LordBrownTrout]

But let's assume Lieberman et al has a valid point. Can anybody think of a scenario in which the government might have to shut down a particular interent service or whatever in the interest of national security?

The only plausible scenario that I can see is that another superpower had a worm/virus that was capable of destroying an entire country's ability to communicate ie internet. In that case, if intel was able to identify that shutting down our internet could contain this threat, then I wouldn't be against it. However, considering how our govt has sunk in recent years, I may be giving them too much credit.

 

[shintao]

But let's assume Lieberman et al has a valid point. Can anybody think of a scenario in which the government might have to shut down a particular interent service or whatever in the interest of national security?

If customers are giving out casualty reports & locations of nuclear missile blasts. Say someone in DC says the White House took a direct hit, or pentagon, or New York, etc. Locations, casualties, accuracy, can all lead to military advantaged strategy's.

 

[xotoxi]

I am not in favor of this because that would require millions of miles of CAT-5 wiring in order to have all internet connections routed through a switch in the White House.

 

[xotoxi]

They become more scared of us everyday....especially when we can retrieve information and news instantly now.

And actually that observation does belong in the debate. It speaks to the possibility of a motive to 'manufacture' a national crisis to better shut up any conversations contrary to a political goal.

You can almost hear it happening:

Chief of Staff: George we need to shut everybody up before this next vote. Go find a pay phone somewhere and call in a nuclear terrorist threat.

George: What kind of nuclear threat?

Chief of Staff: Doesn't matter just so it is big, hugely destructive, we don't know for sure where it will be, it involves a fairly large group of terrorists, and it is imminent.

George: Okay.

Chief of Staff: And you know this is classified right George? If you speak of this to anybody we'll be removing your toenails in a most unpleasant manner. . . . .

We need to find this diabolical George!!!

 

[Paulie]

Why am I not surprised that Lieberman is behind this shit?

 

[Foxfyre]

I am not in favor of this because that would require millions of miles of CAT-5 wiring in order to have all internet connections routed through a switch in the White House.

Well I think the "kill switch" might have just been a metaphor for a power given the President. But you do raise an interesting question. How difficult would it be to shut down internet service in the USA? How interconnected and/or independent are the various components of it? For instance USMB no doubt has its own servor but pays for access to the internet somewhere. Are there very few sources of such access? Or thousands?

 

[Foxfyre]

Then there is this from PC World citing several different sources to say a "Kill Switch" is a really bad idea:

A proposed US Internet 'kill switch' to be used in the event of a cyberwar could actually cause more problems that it would prevent, a new report commissioned by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has argued.

The report for the OECD by the London School of Economics and the University of Oxford looked at the potential of cyber-events to cause major disruption and found a tendency to exaggerated language, an over-reliance on military concepts of war and defence and plenty of confused thinking.

The chance that a cybersecurity event would on its own cause a major global problem were rated as small, and the Internet was also unlikely ever to witness a pure cyberwar of the type summoned up by dystopian pessimists.

More likely, a separate event such as a natural disaster would be made worse by a collapse in electronic infrastructure on which a country had come to depend. As to the threat of a cyberwar, this was more likely to reflect a conflict that was also taking place using conventional military means than one happening purely using electronic weapons.

There was also a tendency for governments to conceive of cybersecurity using conventional military assessments of importance.

"We think that a largely military approach to cybersecurity is a mistake," said report co-author, Dr Ian Brown, of the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. "Most targets in the critical national infrastructure of communications, energy, finance, food, government, health, transport, and water are in the private sector."

The biggest national disruption would be to civilian and private sector assets beyond the protective ring of military cybersecurity. In some cases this might be made worse by governments outsourcing services to private sector organisations, the report suggests.

Internet 'Kill Switch' Could Cause Chaos - PCWorld

 

[Montrovant]

I have read that the president already has the power to shut down parts or all of the internet under the Communications Act of 1934, and that the big difference between that power and this current bill is that under the CA it only applies to time of war, whereas this new bill does not contain that limitation. Does anyone know if this is true? If it is, how does it affect anyone's opinions?

 

[Mr.Fitnah]

I can see no legitimate use for this. What kind of national emergency would it be where the government has the need to pull someone's internet access?

Bad poll numbers: To big to fail.