Lieberman tells Web users to ‘relax’ about ‘kill switch’
rawstory.com
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For what it's worth: A friend used to host his website. The night before an election, they had two expensive dedicated servers running full tilt (static website). That was expensive so Lieberman switched to shared hosting with someone else for the next election. When his website shut down (with some sort of "over quota" text), he blamed his opponent for "hacking" it.
I suppose it's hard to tell the difference between a DDOS attack and lots of website visitors, but a skilled technician is expensive and smarter than a hosting control panel.
I think he's right.
IAmA person who thinks he might manage to defend this crazy-sounding Lieberman argument. Ask me anything. I may not be able to answer everything, though.
2) There has been ZERO concrete examples given of situations that would necessitate use of this new power and why. The Patriot Act was a response to terrorism yet has been used exclusively to investigate money laundering for organized crime. Because this is also a law against an unspecific fear and not against a highly specified vulnerability, what this law will actually be used for is anyone's guess and, like the patriot act, its true use will be invented much later.
3) This IS the authoritarian Great Firewall. Giving the president the power to kill parts of the internet is the SAME THING as allowing executive branch agencies to arbitrarily filter specific content.
4) Coercing ISPs to install traffic-control gateways controlled by the executive branch is the legitimization of domestic spying.
5) It's an unnecessary expansion of the department of Homeland Security to include a cyberwarfare branch. The Department of Homeland Security is quite possibly the most wasteful branch of our government. Homeland Security contracts have been some of the worst of the worst of pork-barrel spending.
6) Lieberman is a tool.
Where I stand, giving to one person the power to completely disable the primary and most efficient way of communication is frightening and awful.
The reasoning behind it? We can stop communications from attacking countries in times of war.
The reality is that there are many other modes of communication for the kind of 1 to 1 communication an attacker would need, but there are far fewer ways for the type of 1 to 1000's communication activists and thinkers need.
As soon as the world knows you have a kill switch, any organized attack will have domestic components, and which means that you still have the possibility of the president screwing up the normal economy, but no additional defense.
And so, why would it be a good idea? That's still what I haven't hear. (It also sounds like your justifications differ from Leiberman's–he's interested in the communications aspect.)
Also, given the atrocious way in which Patriot Act powers have been abused, let alone the manner in which illegal telecom surveillance has been completely ignored (silly people, prosecution of criminals is only for citizens, not government agents!), why exactly should we given Lieberman the benefit of the doubt on these issues at all? Lieberman has failed to investigate any of those issues despite chairing the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs. What else does Lieberman have to do in order to convince us that he does not respect civil liberties at all?
But I do have a question: Would "shutting off parts of the Internet" really work to deter cyber criminals? I honestly don't know the answer, but would love to hear it.
For patients requiring treaments to stay alive, there are generators at every hospital and ambulances to pick up patients in dire need. Even taking your ludicrous scenario of total US power outage attack at face value...oil will still continue to burn without the internet. :D
Isn't it likely that in the event of actual cyber-sabotage, private-sector experts might discover the attacks first, and share countermeasures rapidly among themselves, without any participation of the (slow-moving, often ham-handed) White House and Defense Department?
Might the existence of this bill's new power -- and followup requests to formalize it in automatic systems -- encourage cyberspace national defense planning to over-rely on crude traffic kill commands to the private sector compared to other defense-in-depth?
I'm much more concerned with how "emergency" is defined. Ideally I'd like to see both executive and judicial involvement in mucking around with the net, since in addition to defending the nation under attack you are also effectively constraining hundreds of millions of people's civil rights in various ways at the same time. That's a little too much power for one schmuck and anything that might be called an emergency.
Then the rest of the world routes around it and doesn't let the US become a single point of failure again.
The reasonable side of the argument is that what they really want to be able to do is air-gap the US should it find itself under attack by the rest of the internet. Unfortunately, right now, so much of the internet routes through the US that doing this is almost the same thing as shutting down the internet.
Perhaps I'm wrong. Is there any reason to believe that Lieberman has been prevented from clearly explaining his ideas on his own website?
Given this history, WHICH JUST HAPPENED IN THE LAST FEW YEARS, there is no credible reason to believe that ISPs would "just say no" during a real national emergency.
In a time of emergency and war, a large multinational is not going to bite the (large and powerful) hand that feeds them.
A related current example is BP with the oil spill. BP could very well have said fuck you to the Obama administration and not set aside a compensation fund. However, this would have been done at the cost of current and future federal government contracts.
There is no justification for this bill to exist, other than because these senators decided "If China can do it, then why can't we?"
Also, its frightening to see that people welcome the great firewall of america.
Strange in the "why are you my enemy if I'm talking to you just fine right now and you seem like a perfectly nice person" kind of way.
To the government, communicating in this way might threaten the public attitude of the war. However, I wonder if the age of information darkness is coming to a close.
Meanwhile, you propose that this technical measure, which would do virtually nothing to prevent communications between motivated interested parties in and out of the US, is intended to stifle free communications. If so, this is a clunky and redundant way to accomplish that objective.
All this is, is another way of controlling speech. The internet is the last truly open medium. To allow the government to shut it off because of War or other reasons would be ridiculous. This 'switch' violates freedom of speech by isolating Americans from parts or all of the now 'World' wide web.
Be it court order to load an ACL or a central routing point, the outcome is the same. Take a look at FISA warrant approval rates if you think judicial oversight means anything in the face of national security.
But be that as it may: whether the system is abused in the future or not, it seems to me hard to refute the idea that unfettered connectivity to a network that has been (perhaps negligently) connected to critical infrastructure around the country is something that the executive branch will have to address.
The requirement of judicial oversight does not preclude big brother attempts at censorship. Particularly when the courts feel they are deciding issues of national security. Your citation of the Bush administration does nothing but affirm this point.
Taking your argument about critical infrastructure at face value (which is still a big leap, as you've yet to define any concrete scenarios other than a power outage), there are better ways of achieving the same end goal without denying american citizens their natural and constitutionally affirmed rights.