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Comment by lukev | Hacker News Reader

I still haven't heard a single remotely plausible argument for why a kill switch is a good idea. What's the worst that a "cyber attack" can do? Take down the internet? So why do it for them?

Including text in the law forbidding the president from using it to prohibit citizen's communication is incredibly disingenuous, too, given that that's one of the main points of the constitution.

We already know the US government isn't allowed to do this kind of thing. So why give them the tools? If there's no tool there isn't even any temptation to use it.

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"We already know the US government isn't allowed to do this kind of thing."

You sure about that? I'm pretty sure the President already has far the ability to do far more drastic things than this bill authorizes. See for example: http://gcn.com/articles/2010/06/28/no--kill-switch-in-lieber...

Well,

We could split the difference and say "it tramples constitutional freedoms as generally understood as well as the overall principles of democracy but it's certainly already contained in one or another of the broad powers the executive has amassed over the years."

It feels like the distinction between law and "policy initiative" has been getting thinner and thinner lately given said broad power of the executive branch. This seems to be one of a number of laws which aren't so much passed to give the president new authority to do something but rather to ramp up a policy in a smooth and public fashion. The website seizure bill is another example - when the bill got bogged down, ICE just went out and proved they could do what they wanted regardless. The only cost is flack the government gets on all this.

A couple of years ago they announced something similar with GPS. On the same day two bits of government made announcements.

1, A massive funding for improved GPS security to prevent terrorists causing chaos by them blocking GPS signals.

2, An increase in the powers of everybody from the port authority to the girl guides to have a kill switch to shut down GPS if there was a threat of a terrorist attack.

Finally I have a justification for making an android application that will tell you where you are based upon photographing the stars.

Might find this useful: http://astrometry.net/

Useful when you absolutely definitely need to be there on time - and the other side has just destroyed your GPS satellites

http://books.google.ca/books?id=QymEXZIWEe8C&pg=PA332...

> They said, however, that they'll make sure their forthcoming legislation "contains explicit language prohibiting the president from doing what President [Hosni] Mubarak did."

Oh great, I'm sure the Egyptians can testify as to how laws prevent leaders from doing bad things, especially in cases of emergency / unrest / whatever.

So if you think laws don't matter, why would you care if the kill switch bill is enacted?

Good question. I do believe that laws matter. I'm just skeptical that they'll always prevent abuse by the leadership. Look how the Patriot Act invalidated many basic rights, rights that were enforced by laws. Now they want to reauthorize it. Can you blame me for being skeptical?

I'd rather give the government just enough power, rather than a large amount of power "just in case". In this specific case, I'd rather the president not have such a power, lest he decides to use it in an absurd way in the future. (e.g. America gets attacked again, like 9/11, president pushes button.) Especially since these laws are being proposed and voted on by people who think that shutting down the internet is the way to protect yourself from "cyber attacks", whatever that may mean. They are obviously unqualified to make such a decision, as is the president unqualified to decide when the button must be hit.

I imagine because enacting the law will create avenues that make 'killing the internet' easy. I.e. infrastructure will be put into place to enable it to be exercised at the push of a button.

I think it speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology, but to be fair, the proposal is not to grant the power to disable the Internet.

The proposal is to grant the power to partition the Internet. So, it would not be analogous to how Egypt disabled the Internet almost entirely within their borders. Depending on how you look at it, it's either a subtle distinction, or a huge difference. It still serves the exact same purpose (granting the power to shut down "troublesome" communication channels even if they are physically located outside the country). On the other hand, its activation would not in and of itself impact the vast majority of American citizens (because they only use U.S.-based sites).

The internet is a global internetwork, a network of networks, as it were. That's where the name comes from.

Partitioning the internet is isomorphic to destroying the internet.

Would you say that the Internet is "destroyed" whenever there's an earthquake or something that cuts trans-Atlantic cables? Would you say that it's "destroyed" by China's filtering?

If they cut off US access to internet sites outside of the country, the internet could still be used to organize protests, etc.

Except that if you can partition it you can also take it down. Even if the world "kill switch" doesn't express their intent, it will still effectively be one.

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