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Say No To a Government Internet "Kill Switch"
GMGruman writes "In the name of national security, the feds are considering a law that would let the government turn off the Internet — or at least order broadband providers and ISPs to disable access. InfoWorld blogger Bill Snyder explains why this is a bad idea. Does the US really want to be like China or Iran?"
"It's bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state."
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Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^
Maybe we need a switch to turn off the government?
We all know what the real reason for this is: to destroy the people's main channel of communication in order to extinguish a situation that government deems threatening to its power and revenue. We're not talking about a threat from outside, but rather something from the inside which potentially compromises the elite and their positions.
When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, 'This you may not read, this you may not see, this you are forbidden to know,' the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything--you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him. [Robert Heinlein]
Wherever you go... There you are. B.B.
Hey, why not instead encourage people who decided to connect systems that control critical infrastructure to the public Internet to practice stronger security? Or, perhaps to not connect a critical system to a public computer network?
Palm trees and 8
"But a proposed law that would give the government a so-killed kill switch to essentially turn off the public Internet is very, very worrisome, and it raises the specter of some future administration using that power to crack down on its opponents"
no it doesn't unless you are a paranoid schizophrenic
if we have some sort of warhol worm, everyone ranting against the kill switch will be begging for the president to cut off the internet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warhol_worm
the need to cut off the internet makes perfect sense IN THE RIGHT CONTEXT. which is what the law will be tailored to. but if you take the idea of shutting down the internet, and put it in the context of your deepest fear: say, censorship based on political ideology, of course the idea is frightening. AS IF THIS CONTEXT MAKES ANY SENSE. there is no slippery slope, folks, unless you remove from the law and its invocation the existence of thinking human beings. all jokes about big government to the contrary, that's absurd
people: fight the encroachment of government onto our rights and liberties. but do it intelligently. taking a commonsense provision and imaging its usage in the most ridiculously hysterical fear-based context is NOT intelligence, and it reduces the noble instinct to defend liberty and our rights to a laughingstock
our liberties and our rights and freedoms are utterly doomed if those who defend those notions are hysterical twits who cry the sky is falling about everything. be prudent and intelligent or don't bother: you only hurt the good cause
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The US government liberal and conservative alike continue to create institutions and policies in the name of freedom that limit the actions of individuals to act on there own behalf. Someday soon someone who want power above all will use those institutions and policies against the masses. Then the new American police state will be born. But, I will bet that we will still advertise the country as free.
No sigs in BETA. Beta SUCKS.
"Does the U.S. really want to be like China or Iran?"
Maybe the US as a citizenry doesn't want it... but this administration certainly does.
It's hard to control the message when it's free-flowing and instant via the Internet. This administration wants control, especially in any "emergency".
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
It seems pretty arrogant to assume we're so much different from either of them, every civil liberty violation we point at in our adversaries we see through the goggles of an outsiders opinion. How does it look to an outsider that we held hundreds of people for the better part of a decade with no right to a trial, that the CEO of the only telephone company who told the NSA they needed a warrant is now in jail, that the government tried to suppress video footage of an Apache gunning down good samaritan, so on and so forth.
We like to envision the citizens of countries we don't care for as helpless prisoners or demonic dictators but the reality is probably about half the citizens think the governments wonderful and doing a great job, and half think they're evil tyrants, just like here.
Richard Clarke has suggested that the backbone endpoints, and even ISPs have super smart deep-packet-inspection filters that get their signature files from both folks like AV vendors *and* the government. In addition to signatures for malware, you could certainly create signatures for "dangerous ideas". Speaking of dangerous ideas... He also recognizes that serious oversight is needed to prevent abuse, but makes the assumption that such oversight is possible. When the people you are supposed to be overseeing can control what packets get sent to you, how do you do that?
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Net Neutrality doesn't mean handing over the control of the Internet to the government - it already has that, running the root DNS servers for example. Net Neutrality means that an ISP may not prioritize or filter Internet traffic based on source or destination. This prevents corporations from blocking or sabotaging their competitors, or keep their customers in the dark about something; for example, your ISP can't block Slashdot to promote their own discussion forum with automatic upmodding for astroturfers, nor can Sony pay them to prevent access to less than favourable reviews of Sony televisions on some site.
Probably some actual knowledge of the issue, rather than right-wing propaganda. You know, actually knowing what Net Neutrality means, which you obviously don't.
Without Net Neutrality these various Mafias can simply pay/threaten the ISPs directly to filter traffick.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Probably some actual knowledge of the issue, rather than right-wing propaganda. You know, actually knowing what Net Neutrality means, which you obviously don't.
But no actual knowledge of the way government works. The reason that many people oppose government enforced Net Neutrality is because we know that the government won't limit itself to saying that "an ISP may not prioritize or filter Internet traffic based on source or destination". There have been several Net Nuetrality bills proposed, have any of them been less than 10 pages? If all they were going to do is what you propose, then there would be no need for them to be more than one page. The problem is that every attempt to introduce "Net Neutrality" has contained more than just the limited regulation that you say you want.
If a bill was proposed that said only what you proposed, I would be fine with that, but such a bill will never be proposed.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
When the net was regulated by people with no corporate aspirations, it was efficient and good.
Now that the net was regulated by an international committee of gadflies and dopes, it was less efficient and still okay.
But since they don't seem to have the power to force major ISPs to give open access to their customers, they are no longer useful.
It takes a government to enforce something like that. But then a government, like a corporation or a committee, has its own agenda.
The only choice then is either to let the government do it, but PERFORM YOUR ROLE AS PART OF THE GOVERMENT instead of sitting on your ass whining about its existence, or turn the net back over to the people who invented it (modulo Jon Postel) and give them the legal authority to slap multi-billion dollar fines on router owners who don't route agnostically, not matter in which nation the offender may reside.