Shutting Down the Internet
PC Magazine
Sun January 30, 2011
There is a bill before Congress that is loosely referred to as the Internet Kill Switch that was introduced by Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins. This gives the President the power to literally kill the Internet. Other similar bills by Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe are also being pushed.
These are designed to give authority to the Executive Branch to shut down the Internet in the USA completely during any sort of National emergency or cyber attack.
Let's look at this idea more closely. You'll have to ask Collins, Lieberman, and the other supporters of these bills (there are lots) why exactly they want this. They aren't Internet experts trying to protect the Net from damage. They, to be frank, are clueless about the Internet.
The most specious reason for this mechanism is that if some evil worm or attack on the National infrastructure-a.k.a. "Cyberwar"-would be underway, the Internet would need to be shut down to prevent further damage to the country, which apparently can no longer function without the Net. This is kind of a weird tautology. The country can't function without the Net, so we need to secure the it, which includes having the ability to shut it down. But with the Net down, how can the country function?
You tell me.
The fact is that we have the right kind of network engineers at most of the big ISP operations; they all know each other and can do more within their tech group to thwart any sort of Cyber attack than the office of the President of the United States could ever do. So why does the government want an Internet kill switch?
If they argue that it is to protect financial institutions from online bank robbery, then we have big problems. First of all, the banks would be emptied in a millisecond, and it would be too late to do much about it.
As we've seen during the recent events in Egypt, the Net turns out to be a useful tool to cause trouble. Is that what the government is really worried about? An insurrection by Twitter users? Puh-leeze.
On the other hand, it would be handy to kill the Internet if you planned a coup d'etat in the USA, wouldn't it? It would probably take a single phone call to a few dozen CEO's to kill their systems. I can't imagine any of today's ethics-challenged CEO's having the backbone to say no. But a black box installed at the various hubs would probably do the trick faster.
I think this goes back to banana republic thinking where a revolution would target the local radio stations and take them over, so they could announce victory to the locals. There's a banana republic mentality at work here with this Internet kill switch nonsense. Nobody is taking it over to deliver a victory message any time soon. But the idea is clear. Control the Internet, and you control the masses.
Then there's the fact that too many technologists are under the mistaken belief that a kill switch wouldn't work. After all, the Internet was originally designed as a fail safe mechanism in 1969 to prevent loss of internal communications if there was an atomic bomb attack on the U.S. infrastructure by the Russians. That architecture is long gone in favor of tightly controlled backbone frameworks that can indeed be shut down.
In fact, it might be easier than ever with all the peering agreements in place. I suspect that just shutting down AT&T and Comcast alone might effectively shutter the entire Net in the USA. There may be a few nodes here and there operating from the vestiges of the once rich ISP scene, but they can be tracked down and closed. The giant pipelines out of the country are easily shutdown too.
My advice is to leave the thing alone. This switch would do more harm than good, and I question the motives behind it.
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