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Senate Trying To Slip Internet Kill Switch Past Us
sanermind writes "Sensing Senators don't have the stomach to try and pass a stand-alone bill in broad daylight that would give the President the power to shut down the Internet in a national emergency, the Senate is considering attaching the Internet Kill Switch bill as a rider to other legislation that would have bi-partisan support."
CNN a few years ago ran a special were they told the story of a possible an IT attack and had former government officials try to figure out how to save the day.
The story was that people had downloaded a March Madness smartphone app that delivered scores and such in March, but now its April and it's sending out large amounts data, and making useless calls, that's overwhelming the cellular networks and running up people's bills. Round two was that this unknown data was actually waking up a bot net, and now the Internet's overloaded. Round 3... an explosion at a power station has downed power on the East Coast. However, nobody knows where the problem is to fix it, because their smartphones are dead and so is the Internet and phone systems.
The governmental instinctive reaction is to shut it all down... but you don't need to shut down the Internet, this could have been solved in round one by asking Apple, Google, even Cydia and the other responsible app stores to kill the app. What is needed is a granular control (that the app stores already have) to say when an app is causing trouble, we'll pull it off the smartphones that have it. If there's a server running a botnet, kill it, not the entire Internet.
The panel lost the game, and was punished with a postgame interview by Wolf Blitzer.
This is why we need to switch to a one thing per bill way of doing things. So many things are added to bills to try and hide stuff. Why does the government need to hide information from it's citizens. We need to get everybody in Washington out, and start fresh, but lets do it right, and not use "second ammendment rights" like the crazy tea-party wants.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
The internet is the only thread uniting mankind to the point where a conventional war won't happen easily. Of course, this isn't going to stop nukes or wars in third world countries, but the internet allows people of the country that "we're" bombing to communicate back to us so people push pressure on the government.
Imagine if Iraq or Afghanistan had common internet access, something tells me we wouldn't invade because public opinion would be very much against it. The internet lets you break down all the previous things that held countries in conflict, language, culture, and reporting hindrances no longer exist to countries with internet access.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
... that the nation that provided the infrastructure for the twitter based reports during the Iran uprisings now wants to make absolutely sure that sort of news can't get out, should things go truly bad here.
Check your premises.
When it's time to violate Posse Comitatus
The ability to attach unrelated rider bills to other bills is nonsense and should not be allowed.
I would vote for anyone who would fight to end that nonsense. Unfortunately, I have no voice as I am a legal alien in America and therefore cannot vote. It seems that politicians only want to listen to voters: US citizens and undocumented aliens, apparently.
I was thinking of having protest signs printed with the words "No taxation without representation" at the last election but I doubt if anyone would get the reference.
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
"... this is a matter of national security. A cyber attack on America can do as much or more damage today by incapacitating our banks, our communications, our finance, our transportation as a conventional war attack and the president in catastrophic cases, he's not going to do it every day, not going to take it over, so I say to my friends in the internet relax, take a look at the bill, and this is something we need to protect our country. Right now China — the government — can disconnect parts of its Internet in a case of war. We need to have the ability to do that, too."
Wh.. w.... wha... what!? Are you fucking kidding me? NO. "Cyber war" is wholly driven by bullshit and FUD in news agencies, these people have NO IDEA what they're talking about when they talk about cyber security. Further, in that CNN interview, check this out:
1. Most of these systems are HIGHLY ISOLATED and secured already by way of private networks, firewalls, DMZs, etc. In this way, an attack as described would be incredibly difficult if not impossible. We have no evidence to show that this is even a slight concern. None.
2. An internet attack can be fixed. It doesn't DESTROY equipment, it doesn't level a building, it doesn't kill people, and IT people CAN SHUT OFF EXTERNAL ACCESS TO A SYSTEM if it's being targeted by an attack. I trust the judgement of these professional IT persons that know their own systems intimately far above that of our technilogically incompetent and ignorant president.
3. I've looked at the bill -- nothing in it is even remotely "good." We're good in the IT world. You might not understand that our IT departments are like little units of a larger army. If we get attacked, we can defend ourselves. We don't need you shutting down essential access to patches, communication, support lines, just because you think something might be happening.
4. In China this capability is reserved to kill the movement of information to restrict communication and the spread of anti-government "propaganda" via the internet. I argue that shutting off our networks for ANY REASON WHATSOEVER is a very blatant violation of constitutional rights. Power like this can only be abused, and as I've pointed out, there is NO well-intentioned or well-informed use case where this wouldn't be much more damaging than an actual cyber attack.
This sounds like the squaking of a moron with no clue on national TV. He speaks of how damaging shutting down these systems would be.. and that a cyber attack could easily do that (it can't, not easily), but then proposes we give the president the ability to shut them down forcefully here? Really? Killing our networks to stop our networks from being attacked. Do you not see how downtime is downtime no matter what causes it? At least with our current setups, we can mitigate an attack, if the ISP is forced to SHUT OFF the network, we can't, we're fucked, we're down and we just have to go home and hope the all powerful almighty president decides in his infinite wisdom that it's OK to turn it back on later.
It's simple. This level of micro-management is best left to the ISPs and the companies. Stay the fuck out.
Because the politicians in the US don't give a fuck about ethics, legality, etc. and most people don't either. Our constitution has been shitted on just about every election year with people actually promising in their election ads to tear down pillars of human rights when it comes to "undesirable" people ("terrorists", illegal aliens, "sex" offenders, etc)
But here in the US we have a 2 party system with no real differences between them other than on a few "hot" meaningless issues. For example, should the words "Under God" be on our currency? Despite the fact we have no real debate on actually reforming our currency to be backed by anything. Debates on whether abortion should be legal all the while few debates on privacy issues, etc.
Until we either have an awakening of the masses, or an electoral system like proportional voting, it will remain this way.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I care because they want to mandate technical support to make this easy. My problem with it is actually a security one - this will be another complication with a lot of leverage, and it could easily be a weak point - making much easier the kind of problem they are trying to avoid. To whit: it's stupid.
"I've said it before and I'll say it again: Democracy simply doesn't work"
-Kent Brockman
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Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
I never understood why in the hell this is possible in the first place. What good can possibly come from being able to attach rider legislation to a completely and utterly unrelated bill? This kind of thing happens all the time, and mostly after all the politicians have read the bill and voted on it. This is just such a broken process, it's unbelievable.
I like to think of online DRM as something akin to a college -- you pay for lessons until you learn something.
The November Congressional Elections are just around the corner. If you are tired of the collective douchebaggery and antics of our elected politicians, then campaign, vigorously, in your local community to vote for anyone other than interest-sponsored Democrats and Republicans. Every time politics come up for discussion around my community, I flame both parties equally. Until we convince the rest of the voter base the both party's candidates are corrupt, pandering, unhelpful morons, these kinds of disingenuous shenanigans will continue to run our country.
We, the citizens of the United States, can't take back control of our government until we collectively declare, in a very clear manner, "Enough is enough!"
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
This is just such a corrupt process , it's unbelievable.
There, see how I fixed that for you...
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
You miss the point. There is NO actual threat. If an individual system is connected to the Internet and controls critical things then it is the problem. The trumped threat here is about the same as the Y2K claims. Sure a few systems might crash, but we won't have nuclear weapons launching and power plants exploding. The ability to shut down the Internet, or parts of it, is not about an actual threat, it's about control. Both sides of the political aisle see the Internet as an uncontrolled medium for freedom of speech, and on both sides there are those that see it as something that must be controlled. I used to be strongly for public decency standards on the internet, such as preventing porn from getting to minors, but now I've come to realize that you have to get the good with the bad or just the bad because those that play by the rules are the only one's subjected to the rules.
I honestly fail to see how any kind of "cyberwar" could do more damage than "shutting down" the Internet. Exactly how do these morons in Washington think most business is conducted these days? Do they really believe that we could all easily go back to doing business solely by phone, catalog order and the USPS?
You might as well label the kill switch with "Subtract 90% from GDP!".
Sheesh....
Necron69
and last time I checked it didn't require a whole gang of workers to get out the long insulated pole and flip the fuse back in place.
Never worked with Union workers then? Sounds like you'd need at least 5 guys for that job. A pole extender, a fuse flipper, two signalmen to control traffic, and a supervisor to make sure everyone's looking busy.
Actually, it's not the same as Y2K claims, because Y2K claims were credible. This supposed threat is not at all credible. Only someone who has no technical understanding of how networking works would think that having a kill switch for the Internet could help in some way. What a kill switch for the internet does is provide a handy switch for an attacker to throw that will shut down the entire country.
On the plus side, there's a good chance that after the switch is installed, its first use will be by a black hat trying to cause economic havoc, not by the government. The outcry following this attack will result in its removal.