Proposed Bill Gives President Emergency Authority To Halt Web Traffic; Access Private Data | Hacker News Reader

Proposed Bill Gives President Emergency Authority To Halt Web Traffic; Access Private Data

motherjones.com

30 pointsmdasen30 comments

Can you imagine Mother Jones publishing an article titled "Should Bush Control the Internet?" ? Why is this even a question?

Two things:

1) Good luck trying to "shut the Internet down" after declaring an "Internet emergency".

2) Any sufficiently motivated law enforcement agent can probably already read your mail.

1) The Feds would require Telecoms to implement systems to shutdown portions of "Teh Nets". You don't need to shut down web/email/etc servers you just need to update the config files in a few backbone devices (routers/etc).

You could shut the internet traffic down in my state fairly easily. Most cities are served by a very few providers and all those providers rely on the underlying carries (ATT/Qwest/etc) to get data moved interstate.

The first time the Internet is shut down, you can bet that two things will happen:

1) Big companies will complain very loudly, and probably cost the government and ISPs a lot of money defending lawsuits. (Can you imagine what would happen to Amazon if it were shut down for a day? Not something that's good for their bottom line...)

2) The damage will be routed around. Right now, we trust ISPs because they are convenient. But IP over amateur radio is certainly possible, as are mesh networks and other things like that.

Remember, the entire point of the Internet is to route around damage.

I think the kill switch is intended for a martial law scenario, where lawsuits and the like will be irrelevant.

I assume people will still know how to build their own radios, however.

Haha...this really made me laugh.

Honestly, if there were no web access, how many people in the US could build their own radio?

The time to build (a wireless-mesh replacement for the Internet, sets of encrypted radios, or for that matter, any subversive technology) is now, rather than when martial law is declared - and we are shipped off to the camps before our soldering irons can warm up.

How many people even own dead-tree versions of essential engineering references? Most people have abandoned even dictionaries in favor of the web. We have grown utterly dependent on a rather surprisingly fragile medium with plenty of government tentacles wriggling in assorted orifices.

The point of this proposed bill is to retroactively legalize the unlawful wiretapping that had been going on. It legalizes the things we know about, as well as the things that the media hasn't told us about yet. And I phrase it that way because they knew about the NSA taps and hushed them up for more than a year.

That may be part of the point. I'm not privy to what the insiders on "on the hill" are thinking.

Another possibility is that folks in D.C. are scared that something worse than 9/11 is in the horizon. What could be worse?...global economic collapse. Is it real, is it FUD? Hard to say. But the "PIC" (people in charge) seem to be hedging their bets.

My apologies for sounding like a post from some other forum. Fear does seem to be a primary motivator these days.

This reminds me of a quote from Vernor Vinge's novel A Deepness in the Sky: "The worst tyrannies are those where a government requires its own logic on every embedded node."

Exactly how does this make us more secure, again? I can't imagine anything "critical" that is currently funneled through the internet. At the very least, there should be some examples where this would actually promote safety, rather than be an extension of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1797.

Look, if we don't give them these powers now, we could risk a cyber-Katrina. Do you want that? You know how bad Katrina was? Well, the internet is very complex, connects everything, and is critical infrastructure -- just imagine how bad it could be! Chinese hackers could launch US nukes against US cities if we don't grant these powers!

In reality, the legalization and deployment of this sort of power and technology would allow whoever is in charge at the time to divide the citizenry. If there is no net, large scale organization becomes much harder. If the net kills traditional informational channels and we give a single entity the kill switch to the net, we give that entity the kill switch to democracy.

I still have hope that the USA hasn't become this misguided and corrupt. I don't think anything remotely like this will pass. If it does, though, we are well and truly fucked.

Is this a change in policy?

I thought we had to police the internet to stop child porn on months with an 'R' in them and to stop terrorism in months without an 'R'?

Don't worry, I'm sure the internet-savvy, power-to-the-people, save-us-after-years-of-Bush-darkness President Obama would veto the bill.

Either that's wonderful sarcasm or I live in a miserable world.

This made me think of a sequel to Speed where they can't shutdown the internet because if the internet isn't transfering at least 10terabits/sec through some unknown core routers, it will explode.

This is quite amusing: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06...

> Snowe echoed her colleague, saying, "if we fail to take swift action, we, regrettably, risk a cyber-Katrina."

What is a cyber katrina, can you have a disaster of magnitude on the internet? I'd much rather they be worried about tangible things like bridges and roads. I really don't understand this quote at all.

And I would really like to see internet companies turn off their connections in order to aid in prevent such an emergency that would be an interesting day.

It's a hurriance in the tubes! You have to close the tube to stop the hurricane!

More Change You Can Believe In.

But seriously...don't they get it? It's too late. We can get around any centralized controls with ad-hoc and mesh wireless networks. Freedom will win in the end, and watching these tards struggle against that reality is so sad (yet strangely amusing).

It's never amusing to have somebody continuing to remove your freedom, one bill at at time, year in, year out, decade after decade. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail, but they always move the ball a little closer to the end-zone. The ball never travels in the direction of more-freedom, only less. You're probably too young to get that, but after a few decades, the amusement begins to pall.

> We can get around any centralized controls with ad-hoc and mesh wireless networks

Mesh networks are only viable when population density is high enough. Perhaps in 10 years we'll see progress on that front, but currently it's a non-starter.

However, most businesses require the internet, and really trying to cripple it would destroy the wealth that the government leeches to survive. The saving grace is ultimately HTTPS traffic (since it's used by everybody), and the ability to tunnel arbitrary protocols over it.

Could someone tell me what a "cyber katrina" is? Would that be like someone crashing Digg and HN would have to temporarily house all of the refugees? That could be pretty terrible.

I know politicians are ignorant and really do think the same kind of catastrophic event could happen to any area "on their watch", but how exactly would the internet kill people and destroy homes? The worst thing that could happen to the internet is for it to crash (say, widespread router bug), and this bill would only make this possibility more likely.

The reasoning offered for this law is that communications infrastructure is too important to let go, and therefore the President should be allowed to ignore privacy laws in "emergencies." Does a similar law exist for the postal service, suddenly allowing them to open everyone's mail if they feel like it?

I truly hope that the technical problem of actually using that authority to halt the internet is as intractable as it seems--perhaps pulling the plugs on the root DNS servers would do it for the web and some other services, but many P2P networks would still be up and running.

I imagine they've already had plans drawn up for multiple scenarios. How many squads would they need to dispatch to how many server rooms before things went black? And don't forget, the NSA has hardware in high places.

http://www.google.com/q=nsa+att+server+rooms

First, I am trying to envision the reactions of all the companies that live and die by internet access (myself included)...

Second, I am trying to envision Russia's, China's, et. al. response to the United States of America flaunting this ability...

Anyone doing anything remotely private or personal on the internet is (or should be) encrypting anyway.

Maybe it's not in anticipation, but to say "Behave, or else! :-P"

It's the new "button" carried around in the "nuclear football" -- the "internet off switch"!

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