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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.
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.
This is basically covered under martial law anyway, which would presumably be imposed in the event of an attack. The government already has the power to do anything it wants in such an event, so specifically enumerating an "internet kill switch" is basically moot.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I think he's saying we shouldn't "use" the second amendment to kill every member of congress, not that we should overturn it.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
... 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.
They can always say the internet is wanted for Sweden for rape.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
attaching the Internet Kill Switch bill as a rider
It's also possible that certain Senators are pretending to like this provision because they know its inclusion could kill the entire bill, a bill they despise secretly but cannot dislike openly. It's called a poison pill in parliamentary terms; an addition which, by design, makes a bill less attractive to its original supporters and may not be favored even of the person submitting it.
The internet is the only thing that will keep communications up and SAVE us in the event of a national emergency. When the fuck would we EVER need to shut it down?
Can somebody from the USA please explain why riders are legal?
It's such an obviously malevolent concept that it surprises me every time. It serves no other purpose than to sneak in bills (regardless of whether you consider them good or evil) which would have no chance on their own. Well, I guess it can also be used to torpedo bills which would have made it through otherwise. It just completely undermines the democratic process.
Most civilized countries would (and already have) prohibited riders by law after it happened a few times, but it seems in the USA it happens all the time.
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The cell phone towers all have gensets. Even the ones with the antennas mounted on the roof of an apartment building. They'll either mount it on the roof, or as part of the leasing for the roof space, also lease a small apartment, completely soundproof it, and leave it very anonymous. Found this out while on jury duty listening to the cell company's expert witness explain the set-up of each antenna as they were able to track several user's locations while they were driving around.
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.
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.
you start bitching about how standing up for your rights is a crazy thing to do.
Murdering politicians isn't equivalent to a right to have weapons. That's just one more reason why the tea party is viewed so poorly by sane people.
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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!"
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Now I haven't followed the whole tea party protests very closely, but I believe they haven't resorted to killing politicians. Unless you mean that one group from the 18th century....
SSC
Maybe a few do for short-term outages, but do you understand what is required to keep a generator running for more than a couple of hours? There are no gasoline powered generators designed for that application. There are two types - some recent natural gas/propane ones and big diesel ones. There is no way they have diesel generators at each cell tower, nor is there any provision for refueling them.
Natural gas is a possibility, but I doubt it. Cell phones do not have the same requirements for staying functional during power outages so the ones I am familiar with have battery backup for a while and then just shut down.
Until there are mandates for cell phone operation to continue through a several-day power outage nobody is going to put that sort of investement into the system. Your landline CO has battery banks to power the system for days and there is a diesel generator at most of them with a refueling arrangement to keep it going for months if needed.
Sorry, but cell phones aren't supposed to be reliable in emergency situations. There is no requirement for them to be. Maybe someday.
Sure they do. I've seen hushed diesel genset that are so quiet they make your window AC sound loud. And I'm not talking a one-person portable, but the ones built on their own trailers. Cities are now now requiring them for urban construction sites when you have to keep 100,000 watts of lights on and the power hasn't been connected. You can also get gensets that run on natural gas - no need to have a bottle or a delivery truck. Also, stationary gensets run on #2 diesel year-round if they're indoors, and that's just heating oil - and since it's not being used for automotive transport, they can actually legally use heating oil. A couple of 200-gallon tanks, same as a house, will do them just fine for quite a while. So you don't even need special fuel transports - just have the heating oil guy top it off.
And yes, here in Quebec we had a month-long outage during the killer ice storm, and the region's cell towers stayed up. Maybe you're slackers in the US, but that was over a decade ago, so it's not like it's a new practice.
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
To understand my meaning, search for the wildly criticized phase "second amendment remedies". They keep talking about it as if it's a good idea, not the "Bachmann is actually going to convince one of those idiots is going to kill Obama" liberals fear, but a useful tool in their political toolbelt. Waiting for murder to happen isn't good enough when you know violence has already gone beyond the verbal, and the leaders of the crazies are happy to ignore and embrace it.
I find it funny that Obama has never restricted any of the borderline treasonous and conspiratorial speech about killing his party members, nor acted against WikiLeaks and yet he's still getting this nonsense about how he's a dictator who is somehow going to stop wikileaks with this completely ineffective way.
As an interested foreign observer of US politics, I get the impression that right now if the president had a bill tabled that offered the Republicans full control of the House and Senate for all eternity, they'd still vote against it just because it was proposed by Obama.
You can't have a functioning political system when nearly half of the participants come out in protest against legislation before they even know what it does.
And you conveniently ignore the fact that the right was not granted for individual determination, but as a collective decision. Insane is a perfectly fine way of describing someone who thinks they have the sole capacity and right to choose for the rest of the nation. You are only partially right about revolution is that it is violent, but it is not about assassination. The problem with King George was never looked at in such a way, and the founders would abhor you uncivilized and brutish notion.
On a personal note, if you think I've no taste for violence, I'd be more than happy to school you on the truth. It's a myth that liberals are sissier than you throwbacks, we just don't need it to settle an argument.
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.
You got the date right :-)
Our communications infrastructure stayed up the whole time (though they had do do some "interesting" jury-rigging, like taking a couple of diesel-electric locomotives, derailing them, and having them drive down main street so they could be used as in-sutu emergency generators. Wrecked the asphalt, but everyone had power pic because it did happen).