How Egypt did (and how your government could) shut down the Internet | Hacker News Reader

How Egypt did (and how your government could) shut down the Internet

arstechnica.com

44 pointskylelibra19 comments

It's still strange to me that the press and discussion sites all over the web are directing a lot of attention towards the idea that the US (or European democracies) would do this to itself (for reasons continually left unstated) while the evidently[1] more[2] credible[3] threat[4] of a foreign state actor doing this kind of thing to the US is readily dismissed. As if it really makes a difference to the router who turns it off.

[1]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_Rain [2]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_cyberattacks_on_Estonia [3]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberattacks_during_the_2008_So... [4]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_cyberattacks_on_Myanmar

It would be difficult enough for the US government to shut off the internet in the US (although I don't doubt they could do it). You can't really take a few simple DDoS attacks as an indicator that such a thing could be possible in the US. Besides that, why would they want to shut off the internet when they could probably do any number of much more violent and heinous acts with much less effort and sophistication?

Just switch off electricity for ISP buildings.

All of the tier one carrier hotels have battery backups, diesel back ups, and contracts for thousands of gallons of fuel. Some are even looking at more interesting solutions to that.

However if you really wanted to just cause some mayhem. With a good map and a chainsaw lots is possible.

http://signalfire.org/?p=2039

That's a bit of a fallacy. They compare the US to single European countries. I'm guessing it would be as easy to turn off the internet in California as it would be to turn it off in Greece.

It would be very easy to turn it off to somewhere like Greece. There are probably only a few companies connecting to the outside world. And these are either government owned, or were until recently but are still so civil service minded and government linked that they will do as they're told. Any commercial outfits want to keep operating in that country, so unless they think they will get a better deal from the next ruler - are also going to obey order.

California is trickier, there will be lots of links to towns in other states just because the cable run was shorter or a telco in Oregon wanted more of the market. There will also be a more complex backbone links so someone in Seattle may connect through california to Texas, so blocking out those individual routes without killing the whole network is a lot more difficult.

Would investing more in satellite-based infrastructure be one possible solution?

I doubt it. All it'd take to shut down a satellite is to take over the control room on the ground and transmit a "power down" command or something.

Perhaps a better approach is to work to decentralize as much of our existing infrastructure as possible. Eliminate DNS. Fundamentally change how routing occurs to become more organic. Etc. Non-trivial, to be sure, but possible, IMO, and I think it needs to happen.

The goal should be that any internet-enabled device can mesh with the internet from any other internet-enabled device. Example (contrived) would be my cell phone talking to your cell phone with bluetooth, your phone talking to your laptop with a wifi connection, and your laptop talking to another device via ethernet, etc... and that ultimately, packets flow and end points can find each other all without central routing tables or artificial hierarchies, etc.

So who has the incentive to do this?

Maybe we should create a site/wiki/working group/mailing list to discuss these issues. Otherwise it won't get talked about and never done because the corps definitely don't have incentive to do this.

You're talking about defending against the hypothetical and implausible situation where for some reason the US Government decides to turn off the internet.

I don't have any good ideas about what could possibly cause that to happen, but I'm pretty sure that if it does happen then things are sufficiently screwed up that a lack of internet access will be the least of your problems.

Communication and the access to information is a highly important issue, especially if hell breaks loose in your country.

Though many see internet access as a luxury, it's not just a pornography delivery method. In Nazi Germany, I gather the one of the most difficult issues for underground groups was communications.

The control room doesn't have to be in your country. It's tricky for anyone who isn't a superpower to remove a satelite owned and operated by another country.

Distributed DNS etc doesn't really help if all the cables in and out of your country run through one building and the government owns it.

You could erect the Mother of All Tin Foil Hats over the entire country.

"... Would investing more in satellite-based infrastructure be one possible solution? ..."

Old school HAM, AX.25 and Linux ~ http://tldp.org/HOWTO/AX25-HOWTO/

Yes, if you had a satellite internet modem connection, or satellite phone, you would not be cut off if the main isp was disconnected. However it's slow, like dialup, and expensive per minute.

Huh? If your satellite ISP was disconnected you would not be cut off? Are my preconceptions of how satellite internet works way off? I thought that you were bouncing off of the satellite to your ISP which then connected you to the internet.

Sorry, I mean if your local ISP was cut off, your satellite isp might not be. Eg if you were in Egypt now and the government cuts off all Egyptian isps, then you can still use your satellite phone to dial into your American isp. Satellite isps mean you could be on the different side of the planet from your iap

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