Should the Internet have an 'off' switch?
February 21, 2011 By Jon Swartz
A raging debate over new legislation, and its influence on the Internet, has tongues wagging and fingers pointing from Silicon Valley to Washington, D.C.
Just as the Egyptian government recently forced the Internet to go dark, U.S. officials could flip the switch if the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset legislation becomes law, say its critics.
Proponents of the bill, which is expected to be reintroduced in the current session of Congress, dismiss the detractors as ill-informed - even naive.
The ominously nicknamed Kill Switch bill is sure to be a flashpoint of discussion at the RSA Conference, the nation's largest gathering of computer-security experts that takes place here this week. The debate is sure to intensify after the Obama administration announced Tuesday a new policy on Internet freedom, designed to make it harder for repressive governments to suppress dissent on the Internet - particularly on Facebook and Twitter.
The bill - crafted by Sens. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn.; Susan Collins, R-Maine; and Tom Carper, D-Del. - aims to defend the economic infrastructure from a cyberterrorist attack. But it has free-speech advocates and privacy experts howling over the prospect of a government agency quelling the communications of hundreds of millions of people.
"This is all about control, an attempt to control every aspect of our existence," says Christopher Feudo, a cybersecurity expert who is chairman of SecurityFusion Solutions. "I consider it an attack on our personal right of free speech. Look what recently occurred in Egypt."
Its critics immediately dubbed it Kill Switch, suffusing it with Big Brother-tinged foreboding. "Unfortunately, it got this label, which is analogous to death panels (during the health care debates)," says Mark Kagan, director of research at Keane Federal Systems, an information-technology contractor for the government.
The disruption to communications and economic activity "could be catastrophic," says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
Computer-security expert Ira Winkler, a staunch advocate of the legislation, counters, "The fact that people are complaining about this fact is grossly ignorant of the real world. The fact critical infrastructure elements are even accessible to the Internet is the worst part to begin with."
The overheated debate takes place against the backdrop of revolution in the Middle East and a recent breach of Nasdaq's computer system. Both underline the power of the Internet, its vulnerability and the importance of cybersecurity.
It also underscores the delicate balance between protecting the Internet - the largest communications device - and unfettered free speech.
The autocratic government of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak ordered the shutdown of four major Internet service providers, effectively shuttering the Internet in Egypt for several days. Could that happen in the U.S. if the bill becomes law?
In the U.S., there are 2,000 to 4,000 Internet providers, many of whom virulently oppose government interference that would put a clamp-down on their businesses.
"When it comes to practicalities, I would be surprised if anything comes to (a kill switch)," says Reputation.com CEO Michael Fertik, a lawyer with expertise in constitutional law and Internet privacy law. "If (the bill and president) stray too far, it would be extremely unpopular."
A national necessity?
Last month, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and other congressional members introduced a placeholder bill and stressed that a cybersecurity measure is a top priority for the 112th Congress.
Carper, Collins and Lieberman have yet to announce plans to reintroduce the bill. But it is likely to be included as part of a larger, more comprehensive bill that includes other bits of legislation, say sources close to Lieberman who are not authorized to speak publicly about the bill.
"There can be no debate over whether our nation needs to improve its cyberdefenses," Lieberman, chairman of the powerful Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, said in a statement. "Our legislation is designed to improve these defenses, while protecting the fundamental freedoms that we all cherish."
Lieberman did not comment on whether the bill will be reintroduced.
Proponents of the bill say it is narrowly crafted and does not intend to limit speech but to eliminate the vulnerability of critical systems such as banks, the power grid and telecommunications from attacks by terrorists or agents of hostile countries.
Indeed, the bill specifically does not grant the president power to act unless a cyberattack threatens to cause more than $25 billion in damages in a year, kill more than 2,500 people or force mass evacuations. The president would have the ability to pinpoint what to clamp down on without causing economic damage to U.S. interests, for anywhere from 30 to 120 days with the approval of Congress, according to the bill.
"This is not Big Brother," says Tom Kellermann, vice president of security awareness at Core Security Technologies, and a former security expert for the World Bank. "It's not about shutting off the Internet, but taking a scalpel to command control to key services to protect them."
Winkler, chief security strategist of TechnoDyne, a systems-integration specialist for financial institutions, pharmaceutical companies and government agencies, agrees. "Nobody is giving Obama the ability to kill Twitter access," Winkler says. "There might possibly be unintended consequences, but people are ignoring imminent harm because there may be theoretical harm if the country devolves into a state of anarchy."
Examples abound, say Kellermann and others, underscoring the threat.
More industries could be at risk, Kagan and others warn. "It's 10 years after 9/11, and some companies still do not do a good job defending their computer systems," Kagan says, pointing to major chemical facilities as prime targets.
"Espionage and crimes have exploded on the Internet," Kellermann says. "There has been anarchy over attempts to leverage assets. This closes the spigot on attempted attacks by hostile forces."
Cyberthreats aside, deep questions persist over what critics claim is the bill's heavy-handed approach, what it means to free speech and whether it can be enforced practically.
The crux of the issue, to computer-law expert Fertik and others, is: If the Internet is a national asset, should it be nationalized?
"Determining where the Internet connects to infrastructure is hard to define and impose," Kagan says.
"In its current form, the legislation offers no clear means to check that power," says Timothy Karr, campaign director for media-policy group Free Press, a non-profit organization.
A 1934 federal law that created the Federal Communications Commission allows the president to "authorize the use or control" of communications outlets during moments of emergency of "public peril or disaster." The Lieberman-led bill would be considered a specific extension of that and would let the nation's chief executive prioritize communications on the Internet, says Fertik.
A provision in the bill would let the president take limited control during an emergency and decide restrictions. "It, essentially, gives the president a loaded gun," Fertik says.
"Say there is a mounted attack from a terrorist group on the Internet," Fertik says. "(The law) could present the president with a kill switch option. But what are the conditions, and how far does (the law) go?"
The debate extends to minutiae in the bill's wording.
It neither expressly calls for the creation of an Internet kill switch nor does it exclude one. It only requires the president to notify Congress before taking action, and it specifically prohibits judicial review of the president's designation of critical infrastructure. The non-profit Center for Democracy and Technology, in a measured letter to Lieberman, Collins and others, wants more specifics on the sweep of "emergency" measures mentioned in the bill.
"In our constitutional system of checks and balances, that concentrates far too much power in one branch of government," says Karr. "The devil is always in the details, and here the details suggest that this is a dangerous bill that threatens our free-speech rights."
Giving the president broad power to "interfere" with the Internet - even bottling up chunks of it in the name of national security - would require him to go to court to stop communications, says Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.
What's more, a new law may be next to impossible to administer widely, technology experts say.
"Whether nuclear or the Internet, there is no 'off' button or switch. There is a clear chain of command," Kagan says. "This notion of an all-consuming switch only happens in the movies."
Mubarak was able to temporarily silence the Internet because there are a small number of Internet providers in Egypt. Yet, even with the nationwide digital blockade, activists still communicated effectively, using old-fashioned methods.
Silencing portions of the Internet faces a steeper challenge in the U.S., where there are thousands of Internet providers and where the federal government's previous efforts to clamp down on hostile threats have met with little success, says EPIC's Rotenberg.
He points to a non-Internet example, the struggle to contain the nation's borders. "That was tried with (the Department of Homeland Security) on the border fence, and it was a disaster," Rotenberg says.
(c) 2011, USA Today.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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Feb 21, 2011
Rank: 4 / 5 (8)
Feb 22, 2011
Rank: 5 / 5 (8)
Feb 22, 2011
Rank: 3.7 / 5 (3)
Ideally the Internet should be completely decentralized, with a router in each home providing the function of a node in the decentralized Internet. The router should be included in the 'standard equipment' of a house or apartment, just like kitchen equipment usually does (at least in most western countries, Netherlands excluded haha).
This would of course do away with ISPs and government control as well...
Feb 22, 2011
Rank: 4 / 5 (4)
Feb 22, 2011
Rank: 5 / 5 (5)
Feb 22, 2011
Rank: 5 / 5 (3)
can you imagine the cost to both industry and peoples lives having our main communication tool switched off?
Feb 22, 2011
Rank: 5 / 5 (1)
So an internet kill switch for a large country like the U.S. is probably 'undoable' from a technical standpoint.
J.
Feb 22, 2011
Rank: 5 / 5 (1)
physorg.com/news/2011-02-mideast-china-firm-internet.html
Feb 22, 2011
Rank: 5 / 5 (2)
Feb 22, 2011
Rank: not rated yet
Feb 22, 2011
Rank: not rated yet
Feb 22, 2011
Rank: 2.3 / 5 (3)
The great equalizer of the 20th century was the engine and the gun, but in the 21st century it is the computer and the network.
Our right to communicate with each other is a Constitutional right. We will respond to this aggression like any other threat to the sovereign citizens of the United States.
Feb 22, 2011
Rank: 5 / 5 (3)
Feb 22, 2011
Rank: 5 / 5 (7)
Feb 22, 2011
Rank: 5 / 5 (4)
Feb 22, 2011
Rank: 5 / 5 (2)
Congress is naive and MISinformed.
Feb 22, 2011
Rank: 4 / 5 (4)
Now we see what could have been one of the purposes of the celebrated "stuxnet" attack -manufacture and deploy a model threat, in order to quell dissent.
In broad terms, though, it does seem a no-brainer that any critical systems(Public or Private) or infrastructure should be isolated from the web, with only very limited access, and then they could be shut down in the event of an attack -individually- as opposed to hitting the "killswitch" due to some amorphous, imminent threat, that is entirely at the "I say there's a threat"(actual or not) of the pres.
The big question is: what exactly is defined as a "threat"? Hackers blowing up a reactor? Food riots in El Paso? SEIU workers striking in Wisconsin?
I worry about this killswitch being used to stifle the excersise of our constitutional rights- and for the same reason that I feel them threatened by the Patriot Act and the Emergency Powers executive directives issued in the recent past.
Feb 22, 2011
Rank: 1 / 5 (8)
This is the Obama administration, not the hated evil Chimpy BusHitler. Any of you who think that this government is not trying to harness the internet for political purposes, Cass Sunstein has already proposed using fake internet IDs to influence opinion.
But given that many of you like this "consensus" thing, as the East Anglia incident proved, you're probably not worried about it because it will just be the fascist racist rightwing that will be silenced.
Until 2012, at least, that is. Be careful what you wish for, because the side you hate will also be back in power in the not too distant future, and payback can be a bee-otch.
Net Neutrality is just the beginning.
Feb 22, 2011
Rank: 3.7 / 5 (3)
Well, snookie,
That cuts both ways. My prediction is that you and yours have very seriously misinterpreted the results of the last election, and will be reduced to wailing and gnashing your teeth when your fascisticfreemarketeering dreams are get peeled back by in a new clampdown on corporocratic overreach.
In the meantime, feel free to live in the grossly distorted tunnel vision you like to claim is "reality".
Feb 22, 2011
Rank: 3 / 5 (2)
Feb 23, 2011
Rank: 5 / 5 (2)
Feb 23, 2011
Rank: 5 / 5 (5)
I am unaware of a computer virus that can overcome a properly secured server of any OS type.
That being said, "properly secured" is not a descriptive term.
No government should have any access to any form of "off" switch for the internet.
Feb 23, 2011
Rank: 1 / 5 (8)
Nor should it be even thinking of using fake ID's on social networks to influence opinion or otherwise spread propaganda, non? Imagine the firestorm of outrage from the media if this had been the dreaded BusHitler doing it.
And notice how everyone here has already gotten the political correctness memo about "civility". The original proposal in Congress was to authorize the president to have an internet "kill" switch, but all I see here is "off" switch.
More of the wussification and pussification of the American male.
Feb 23, 2011
Rank: 1.3 / 5 (10)
You must think I'm a Republican or something. 2010 was NOT about preferring the R's, it was about preferring ANYTHING to the right of the current administration.
The last election was a total repudiation of Obama, the left and Progressivism. Big-government Republicans like Bush were, and always have been, just a smaller part of the same problem - monstrous out-of-control government. Remember, McCain himself had to spend thirty million dollars to save himself from a challenge on the right in just the primary.
If you read the election results as anything else, you'd better go back in the basement to your comic books.
Feb 23, 2011
Rank: 3.7 / 5 (3)
From the outside it just looked like idiots voted, from the outside the republicans are scary, do they ever think of the common person? It seems they just want to remove everything the poor have access to, and give themselves tax breaks. I don't understand why people would vote for liars of such magnitude :/
What's it like from the inside? Looks exciting, aha :]
Feb 23, 2011
Rank: 5 / 5 (2)
Feb 23, 2011
Rank: 2.3 / 5 (3)
Your complete lack of ability to see or understand anything without a Fux Yous-tinted telescope would be astonishing, until one takes a moment to reflect upon the extent of your intellect.
Don't forget to breathe. Otherwise, we'll all be deprived of an helplessly idiotic, amusingly rabid hater to bust up here on physorg.
Feb 23, 2011
Rank: 5 / 5 (1)
Eh. I am a Computer Scientist, i build my own linux kernels, i have seen the source code of windows XP.
Your arguments hold no water. Have you seen the kernel security features?
Feb 26, 2011
Rank: not rated yet
Feb 27, 2011
Rank: 5 / 5 (1)
That's not entirely true. If the US government decides to take over ICANN and IANA, they can effectively drive the whole internet into such a chaos that nobody can do anything with it. It would split into a million separate networks that can't agree how to connect to each other. Without a central authority to hand out the numbers and adresses to each party, it cannot function for a very long time without running into internal conflicts.
If the original vision had been implemented completely, we would have something that resembles the NAT systems under IPv4 where unique adresses are not necessarily needed, and the internet would be truly scale free - free to expand from every point to infinity. Now, with the new IPv6 system, the limits have simply been pushed further but the central control remains.
Feb 27, 2011
Rank: 2 / 5 (1)
The net can and should be compared to roads and highways. They, too, are our "basic rights". Now, setting up road blocks to catch a fugitive, will hardly raise a public uproar, right?
Similarly, if there were terrorists with a nuke hiding in a town or city, nobody would start crying if the army blocked all roads in and out of that city, now would they?
Do you think the government would hesitate for a single second if they got the impression that ALL ROADS in the US should be blocked, if they felt it serves the needs of national security? (Of course, they don't have enough soldiers to do it, but that's besides the point, isn't it.)
The same goes for the net. We can be all about Rights, etc., but when the crap really hits the fan, the net gets shut. Period.
Feb 28, 2011
Rank: 5 / 5 (2)
-- the above quote from the article is evidence the author can not accept the possibility that protecting the internet and free speech are on the same side.
this underscores the delicate balance between protecting the truth - an american value - and allowing this authors unfettered distortions."
Feb 28, 2011
Rank: 3 / 5 (2)
The countries outside the US are already waiting for a precedence to replace the US-centered root server architecture.
Feb 28, 2011
Rank: 5 / 5 (2)
Feb 28, 2011
Rank: 1 / 5 (4)
Now, now, there, little Taliban, back to the basement with you. The grownups are discussing big people stuff. When you're old enough to have real responsibilities and some skin in the game, maybe you'll understand better.
Feb 28, 2011
Rank: not rated yet
Feb 28, 2011
Rank: 1 / 5 (5)
Geez, you leftlings simply cannot get melanin content out of your heads, can you? I suppose you feel that words like "black hole" should be banned as racist too, like that nitwit in Dallas. Not everything has to do with skin color.
From Investopedia:
A term coined by renowned investor Warren Buffett referring to a situation in which high-ranking insiders use their own money to buy stock in the company they are running.
In other words, put your own money where your mouth is.
Sheesh.
Feb 28, 2011
Rank: 5 / 5 (1)
Feb 28, 2011
Rank: 5 / 5 (1)
Cry, cry, cry me a river, geez. If your rants here were of an adult variety(I know you can do it- I've actually seen a couple) then the responses you get would be a bit less critical. It's up to you, though, to drop the baiting rhetoric, and express yourself rationally.
If you choose to keep sucking that "skin" I gave you, then don't complain about being ridiculed. Who am kidding -I know perfectly well what your response will be: More of the same. After all, your purpose here is to promote your Randian/Tea party/Rightwing/freemarket/Corporocraticism.