Slashdot Mirror
US Has Secret Tools To Force Internet On Dictatorships
4phun found a Wired story that talks about the military options when a dictatorship decides to cut off internet access to its population.
"The American military does have a second set of options if it ever wants to force connectivity on a country against its ruler’s wishes. There’s just one wrinkle. 'It could be considered an act of war.'"
Hopefully the same options will be available for us when our government gets around to implementing our own kill switch.
Did you read the article? It discusses flying cellular towers and other such connectivity solutions. That's not shadily exploiting a back door. It's like walking to your house and noisily building you a new front door.
Anything to break the usual Comcast/whatever monopoly for ISP service would be welcomed.
...the access would be for the people to communicate and keep it real, that we're the white hats. But of course the access would only be granted to advance a military objective, such as continuing and fanning an uprising perceived beneficial to our interests.
Why stop there? Why not seed blogs, twitter and facebook and initiate a misinformation campaign?
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
Not really backdoors, if you RTFA. They can broadcast network signal, give people satellite phones or other satellite transcievers. There's more stuff that the officer didn't want to discuss, because deployment of those is decided at the level of "commander-in-chief".
That would work, although it'd be rather expensive - http://www.thuraya.com/
444 kbit/s. I guess that's better than what most citizens have even when the internet is working.
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
I am pretty suspicious of all the things that people claim as " inviolable human rights" now. Would the USA put its money where its mouth is and give money to foreign powers to give people internet access? Would they even pay for someone in part of the USA who can't afford access in a remote area?
If anything this dilutes the idea of real human rights - if every country in the world doesn't provide "human rights" to someone or other it becomes meaningless to criticise counties on this ground. Human rights should be confined to life, liberty, and essentials that we would all agree on.
People who want internet access write down the URL on a piece of paper, smuggle the piece of paper to a CIA operative, and the response is broadcast in the form of printouts of the requested web page dumped out of a Hercules C130.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Use drones to airdrop a small kit containing a satphones with free satellite access for a while and a solar charger. Make sure the satphone is by default enabled as an open wifi hotspot. Spread all over the country. Be sure to include free porn memberships in uptight countries. I mean, come on, this has got to be a lot more efficient for democracy than sending tanks (and cheaper to boot), and a lot safer than sending journalists.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Knowing Internet could have been restored when it was needed and was not is rather sad. An act of war against a falling dictator is quite a bit less risky. The saddest part of this whole event is not fully supporting 82 million people at the brink of ending their dictatorship and achieving democracy, out of fear of the possibility they won't elect your friends. After 30 years of supporting their dictator, it wouldn't be surprising. I'd think that if the US authorities and media has thrown full support and started egging people on to get real democracy and freedom, there was a good chance they would elect a government for peace and stability, and in the process US-friendly . But fear and blowback is a bitch, isnt it.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
I'm not sure my friends out in the "sticks" would enjoy drones circling overhead, but they would get excited about FTD (faster than dialup) internet. And this would give the military a way to practice their internet enabling battle plans.
the american president is not going to cut off the internet and start goose stepping around the white house. this ranks right up there with other paranoid schizophrenic fantasies like rednecks with guns in the woods are going to save us from fascism. please stop mentioning the american internet kill switch in the same sentence as egypt, china, or iran. its just... dumb
we live in an abused, yes, compromised, yes, but still functioning democracy. meaning rule is by consent, not force and fear. any president who cuts off the internet is going to have to explain his or herself to the people who elected him or her. and the american people are still electing presidents (now comes the part where some genius complains about liberal media and propagandized morons or conservative media and propagandized morons... snore... thank you for thinking so lowly of your fellow citizens. oh where is your nonexistent utopia where every citizen is perfectly ideologically in tune with you as only an "educated" person would be?)
in egypt or china or iran the kill switch can be invoked, and then: you got a problem with that? there's no accountability to the people of those countries. if the people get angry, crack skulls until they cower again in fear (until blessedly, as the people in egypt show us, the people just aren't afraid anymore, and it is revealed to the world exactly why democracy, as messy as it is, is still so superior to despotism: its simply more stable because it manufactures legitimacy by consulting the people)
but fear is not how it works in the usa. really, mr. snarky teenager. do you feel afraid criticizing the us government on slashdot? oh, why not? maybe because you have that right AND THAT RIGHT IS RESPECTED. aka: you do not live in a society ruled by fear. want to test that? ok: try criticizing the chinese government in china or the iranian government in iran as vocally and as vociferously and as loudly and as repeatedly as some of you false equivalency geniuses, who think your democracy is just as bad as despotism. go ahead, go on with your bad self. what happens to squeaky wheels like you in iran, china, or egypt?
now that you understand the difference, please understand that the reasons for the use of an internet kill switch are for entirely different criteria in democracies versus despotic countries. a valid use: some armageddeon level ddos or a warhol virus, versus an invalid use: preventing the people from coordinating and rising up against their oppressors
look: there are many problems with the american government. i repeat: there are many problems with the american government. i am not an american apologist. but making snark about the american internet kill switch in the same breath as the policies of egypt, or iran, or china, governments clearly far, far worse in terms of the rights of its citizens, that doesn't advance any cause you believe in. it just makes you look stupid and either ungrateful for how well you have it, or simply naive and uneducated about how little rights people have in other countries
teenage level snark might get snickers from other snarky teenagers, but its not the path to valid commentary on your government or any other government in the world
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Wow this article is full of "Well we would , but we don't want to go into those military secrets."
> operatives could smuggle small satellite dishes into a country
Seriously?
Or in other words: the problem isn't internet connectivity, the problem isn't dictators, the problem is governments.
The US government is better than a dictatorship, but only by degree. The US is not democracy: your vote in elections doesnt matter, and more importantly you have no voice in Congress, the executive, or the military. The US government is owned by the people who pay for it.
The solution isnt to get the government/military to protect the internet, it is to get the internet to overcome the need for governments/militaries.
The people who are building a peer-structure internet are in fact creating the foundation for a completely new form of governance. Just you watch.
Aren't the Egyptians telling you guys to stay out!? Maybe it's better if you don't get involved for once.
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
I ask that rhetorically, but has VOA become so neutered and politically correct that it could not at least broadcast current events to the Egyptian people? It wasn't that long ago that VOA was jammed regularly in the former Soviet Union.
Carpet-bombing the country with 'cheap' sat phones or wireless routers for use with a foreign-sponsored offshore Internet service sounds like fun, though. All we need to do is figure out how to set up the link so aircraft don't need to overfly the target nation, and set these up as mesh nodes to extend the network into the interior. And keep the airborne links far enough outside the target's borders to pretend they are in 'international' airspace. Battery power is not a good idea, but it may be the simplest thing. Imagine a national ban on batteries... USB-powered devices would be ideal, but that's a tall order technilogically...
These flying access points better be remotely piloted, though. Hosni in particular knows his way around air defense, and has good equipment.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
"may still has"
Ugh. Engrish fail. Need more caffeine.
English is a fault tolerant language, so don't sweat it. You can make all kinds of errors in English, and everyone will still understand what you meant to say, nonetheless. At a lab from my employer, in Austin, Texas, a guy from Taiwan was speaking English with a guy from India. Their English would have made my 7th grade English teacher commit Seppuku (aka, Harakiri), but they were able to communicate with it.
In my opinion this is why English is so dominant on the Internet: you don't need to know much to communicate. Unless some sesquipedalian like me starts using terms like obsequious and innocuous.
This is why dictators are scared of the Internet: Folks can get across what is going on in their country to a wide audience.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Two-way communications are much harder, and can quite often require physical presence in the airspace of the defender.
Getting signals into Egypt is easy. Getting them out is hard.
Dictator: Shut down your satellite access
US: Oh were really sorry those wascally hackers keep breaking our pass codes! Were trying really hard to lock them out (changes password to fred ) there that should do it.
One could construe their satellite hacking problems in Brazil to be laying ground work for this position.
This has been done since 1990!
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html
No, their compilers are normal, and they could understand everything as well as anybody else. They just have all warnings on and the compiler set to fail on warnings.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
brought to you by the united states of america! (note: offer not valid in guantanamo bay, some restrictions may apply, see abu graib for details. offer void if found on US Targeted Killing list)
Good people go to bed earlier.
the american president is not going to cut off the internet and start goose stepping around the white house. this ranks right up there with other paranoid schizophrenic fantasies like rednecks with guns in the woods are going to save us from fascism. please stop mentioning the american internet kill switch in the same sentence as egypt, china, or iran. its just... dumb
we live in an abused, yes, compromised, yes, but still functioning democracy. meaning rule is by consent, not force and fear...
Goddamnit, dude. Way to miss the point. Nobody, and I mean absolutely nobody, is saying the US is as bad as Egypt or China. What we do say when we compare the proposal for the kill switch in the US with what happened in Egypt is that we don't want to move in that direction. It's not that we fear tomorrow the President is going to go dictator on us...it's that we don't want to make it any easier for this to one day happen, even 200 or 400 years from now.
but fear is not how it works in the usa. really, mr. snarky teenager. do you feel afraid criticizing the us government on slashdot? oh, why not? maybe because you have that right AND THAT RIGHT IS RESPECTED.
Exactly. So now is the time to use those rights. You're not supposed to wait until we become a dictatorship to start criticizing your government when it moves in a direction of increased government power. By that point it's far too late, and it's very difficult to turn back. You have those rights now for a reason, and maintaining vigilance is the fucking reason. Stop saying, "we're not as bad as China." That's not something to be proud of. We know we're not as bad as China, but the bar isn't set that low. Once we can point to anything at all in our government that is remotely similar to what governments with less freedoms are doing it's time to stop and think about the direction we're moving in.
4 years before we intervened on Egypt's behalf, we murdered a popular Iranian leader and helped the Shah regain power. That worked out really well in 1979, didn't it?
Here's a novel thought: leave Egypt alone. Let the people sort it out. If the US throws up its hands and walks away, there's no way the US can be blamed for good or ill.
What you don't seem to get is that if we "support the people" and the Muslim Brotherhood successfully takes control in place of Mubarak, we'll be blamed for that and that's not the sort of thing which will help the spread of representative government in that region or help our interests.