U.S. Government Proposes "Internet Kill Switch"

[Bloodstain]

Way to screw with the economy.

Good thing I don't live in the U.S.

 

[ahappycamper]

I see the importance of protecting our cyber-resources but I am cyber concerned about what effect of all this internet policing will have on our day-to-day internet usage, I'm worried that all this security and policing will reduce out cyber-freedom and negatively affect the amazing creativity of the internet. If every company is looking over their shoulders every time they do anything remotely surprising or risque' then the internet will start looking more and more like the local library. OOh take your shoes off and make sure you don't disturb other users.

Why does the U.S. government get a huge stiffy every time that they think of a new way to reduce our freedom and increase their totalitarian control?

 

[Darks63]

Joe Lieberman once again proving he is a idiot.

 

[Danpascooch]

Why are people acting as if by proposing a last resort, temporary security measure, that Lieberman is trying to destroy the internet, and has already succeeded?

The thing about emergency actions that give someone a hell of a lot of power is quite the problem, even if it was simply just proposed.

This is no small matter, as what exactly is accomplished by having a "kill switch" for all the internet? What exactly is saved by shutting it all down?

If we were to come under "cyber attack" what exactly would shutting down the internet do? You can't find your attacker by closing all the doors in your house. When you finally decide to open one again, the attacker will just go through that.


The reason everyone is so up in arms over this sort of thing is that proposing giving someone absolute power over something is not liked at all, because absolute power cannot be questioned.

Let's say a terrorist groups discovers a major vulnerability in a common website template, and starts stealing information from banks, and government records en masse (this seems like an impossible scenario, but as the internet continues to exist and expand, it's not unreasonable to believe that this may happen at some point down the line), this kill switch could be deployed NOT to FIND the attackers, but to stop them from stealing this information by pulling it off the web, at this point the security hole that allowed the attack could be isolated and repaired, at which point these sites could return to the web.

The reason I'm alright with this is because it can't be used in secret and abused like other measures such as wiretaps, if this kill switch was ever used, nearly every person in America would instantly know what happened when they lost connectivity, and they would demand answers, at that point the people in the government behind flipping the switch would have to provide sound proof that it was necessary, or they would surely be at the end of a major investigation.

In short, there is no potential for abuse barring complete corruption of all of the major courts and branches of the United States government, and I'm not enough of a conspiracy theorist to believe the entire government in all of it's checks and balances could be completely corrupted toward a single end all at the same time. If that ever did happen, it would be revolution time, and at that point there would be far graver concerns than loss of internet access.

Yeah...I wish I could live in your world. Only a few people need to be corrupt. Not everyone. The guy who flips the switch because he doesn't like whats going on in the internet, the guy who is going to "fix" the problem, and then the guy whose going to say "oh yeah, we stopped those terrorists" and make up some bullshit.

Absolute power is not looked upon very kindly.

And you think the American people would buy bullshit in such an extreme scenario? I have a little more faith than that in our citizens.

 

[cjbos81]

Why does everyone have a problem with this proposed law.

Habeas corpus was suspended during the civil war.

All air travel was shut down following 9/11.

The internet is actually under threat from anti-western entities, including china, russia, north korea, and various rogue nations throughout the middle east.

All of our electrical grids, and other resource delivery systems are in fact accessible via remote computer networks.

The most common opinion of the people commenting here seems to be this notion that the "evil American government is going to shut down the internet because they're evil and they want to kill us all for oil" or whatever the hell most anarchists think.

If our critical systems are under legitimate enemy attack, I want them to have the legal authority to take action. I'm not worried. I exist outside of the internet. "oh no the internet is shut down to protect of municipal water systems. Oh no. How will I watch my youtubes. [single gunshot] head slumps against desk."

 

[Mr.Pandah]

Why are people acting as if by proposing a last resort, temporary security measure, that Lieberman is trying to destroy the internet, and has already succeeded?

The thing about emergency actions that give someone a hell of a lot of power is quite the problem, even if it was simply just proposed.

This is no small matter, as what exactly is accomplished by having a "kill switch" for all the internet? What exactly is saved by shutting it all down?

If we were to come under "cyber attack" what exactly would shutting down the internet do? You can't find your attacker by closing all the doors in your house. When you finally decide to open one again, the attacker will just go through that.


The reason everyone is so up in arms over this sort of thing is that proposing giving someone absolute power over something is not liked at all, because absolute power cannot be questioned.

Let's say a terrorist groups discovers a major vulnerability in a common website template, and starts stealing information from banks, and government records en masse (this seems like an impossible scenario, but as the internet continues to exist and expand, it's not unreasonable to believe that this may happen at some point down the line), this kill switch could be deployed NOT to FIND the attackers, but to stop them from stealing this information by pulling it off the web, at this point the security hole that allowed the attack could be isolated and repaired, at which point these sites could return to the web.

The reason I'm alright with this is because it can't be used in secret and abused like other measures such as wiretaps, if this kill switch was ever used, nearly every person in America would instantly know what happened when they lost connectivity, and they would demand answers, at that point the people in the government behind flipping the switch would have to provide sound proof that it was necessary, or they would surely be at the end of a major investigation.

In short, there is no potential for abuse barring complete corruption of all of the major courts and branches of the United States government, and I'm not enough of a conspiracy theorist to believe the entire government in all of it's checks and balances could be completely corrupted toward a single end all at the same time. If that ever did happen, it would be revolution time, and at that point there would be far graver concerns than loss of internet access.

Yeah...I wish I could live in your world. Only a few people need to be corrupt. Not everyone. The guy who flips the switch because he doesn't like whats going on in the internet, the guy who is going to "fix" the problem, and then the guy whose going to say "oh yeah, we stopped those terrorists" and make up some bullshit.

Absolute power is not looked upon very kindly.

And you think the American people would buy bullshit in such an extreme scenario? I have a little more faith than that in our citizens.

Yes, yes I do. For the same reason a lot of people out there believe that 9/11 happened because of government conspiracy. Or that Bush didn't help victims of Katrina because he just didn't tell anyone about it (when he clearly told the governor and mayors to get everyone out asap). And a whole ton of other bullshit. Frankly, my faith in our citizens has waned extremely.

 

[cjbos81]

Problem: Cyber (can we please retire this overused word?) security around some government databases is not as good as it could be.

Solution: Shut down the entire internet?

This is a lot like saying, "We're getting a lot of prank phone calls, so we decided to tear out the city's phone lines and cell towers rather than, say, screening our calls or getting a new phone number."

Way to screw with the economy.

Good thing I don't live in the U.S.

I'm pretty sure the "shutting down" of the internet would actuall be a series of measures for extreme and temporay circumstances. Like after 9/11. As we can see, air travel has since resumed. Besides which, most business still occurs outside of the internet. If the system is temporarily affected by governmemt action, it will be alot better than some terrorist attack that completely destroys those very systems.

 

[Ashendarei]

the problem with giving any group or persons power, is that they'll feel tempted to use it. I don't think there's much they could use it for that would provide an appropriate benifit worth the cost of interrupting service to millions of users.

 

[All_Aces]

Let me get this straight. We're giving control of the world's largest platform of free speech to a corrupt minority of people who can deactivate it at a whim deemed "terrorism?"

What could POSSIBLY go wrong?

 

[Anticitizen_Two]

Tsk, tsk... Don't they know that turning off the Internet means the terrorists have won?

 

[jthm]

Man, I didn't realize I woke up in China this morning.

 

[Flight]

I doubt that will solve much, if anything.

 

[JelloKZ]

Canada, here I come.

 

[Furrama]

This will never go through, it would be too unpopular.

Keep an eye on it though.

 

[kingpocky]

Does anyone seriously think that this bill is some sort of government plot for power that was all agreed upon by the president and the rest of the senators? Because if you do then you are fucking stupid. This was just one crazy senator that everyone in our country hates in the first place. What if some representative in Britain pushed for a bill that orders everyone over two hundred pounds to go to a work camp? The blame wouldn't fall on the country, just the crazy assclown who proposed the bill.

Also, why do people cry about losing freedom when being able to propose such an absurd bill only shows how much freedom America gives and people take advantage of. Maybe most of you should have read the whole article and come up with something better than a kindergardeners interpretation of while the American government is full of shit.

I bet you are one of those people that thinks we are in iraq to fight the "terrorists" and find "osama bin laden" and not to make a bunch of white guys rich from oil and the sale of military supplies to the government.

I bet you also think it's ok that if you are labeled a "terrorist" by the government that they can hold you as long as they want, even without proof, and deny you a fair trial.

I could go on and on about how the government is taking away our freedoms legally because people with no brains did nothing, but I wont.

Bottom line is, the internet is a powerful tool that should not be allowed to have an off switch.

Wow, Digitaldreamer. I think you're actually being serious, which is funny, because I doubt I could write something that looked more like trolling if I tried as hard as I could. The guy said nothing that has anything to do with Iraq or terrorism by any stretch of the imagination, and yet you come up with this shit out of thin air? It'd be like if in the middle of a perfectly rational discussion on healthcare, I suddenly shouted "YOU MUST BE ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE WHO THINKS THAT MURDERERS SHOULD BE SET FREE IF THEY SAY THEY'RE SORRY." I even agree with the last thing you said, and from the quote, it doesn't even appear that TheTurtleMan disagrees with the assessment that the internet should not be allowed to have an off switch. All he said was that the idea was the responsibility of one guy, not the entire government.

 

[Chainsaws_of_War_2]

Now that's what I call a load of cyber-bullshit.

 

[tehroc]

OT: Is this just for the US? Cus I'm questioning why they would have any right to turn off British internet, considering A) They HAVE no right and B) We technically invented it

Any proof of that? If you don't have any proof, then i claim that the Internet was "techincally invented" by Russians.

OT: the US government won't approve of that bill, for many many many reasons. They may be stupid, but they're not that stupid. It may sound odd, but even stupidity has it's limits.

On 6 August 1991, CERN, a pan European organization for particle research, publicized the new World Wide Web project. The Web was invented by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. An early popular web browser was ViolaWWW, patterned after HyperCard and built using the X Window System. It was eventually replaced in popularity by the Mosaic web browser. In 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois released version 1.0 of Mosaic, and by late 1994 there was growing public interest in the previously academic, technical Internet. By 1996 usage of the word Internet had become commonplace, and consequently, so had its use as a synecdoche in reference to the World Wide Web.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpanet

ARPAnet is the origins of the internet, designed for the US military. The project started in the 1960s.

 

[DeleteMe1112311]

I'll take my freedom and the possibility of the internet being used for something dangerous over giving the government the power to completely shut off the main source of information any day. and I'm a fucking liberal democrat by most definitions. The government just can't be allowed to have power like that - look how corrupted it already is with what it has.

 

[tehroc]

Ladies and gentlemen: the Democratic Party.
Having to pick between these guys and the Republicans is the true cost of freedom.

Dude no one considers Lieberman to be a Democrat. He's a corporatist through and through.

 

[Gamegodtre]

time to put lieberman into the home

A nice white room with pillows on the walls.

Or a basement in Iraq's Kandahar provence, I don't care which.

meant old folks home