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Court: Homeland Security Must Disclose 'Internet Kill Switch'
An anonymous reader writes "The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) must disclose its plans for a so-called Internet 'kill switch,' a federal court ruled on Tuesday. The United States District Court for the District of Columbia rejected the agency's arguments that its protocols surrounding an Internet kill switch were exempt from public disclosure and ordered the agency to release the records in 30 days. However, the court left the door open for the agency to appeal the ruling."
It depends whether you just kill DNS and wait for most users to give up, or want to kill everything at once and have to reach into the many central nodes that would bring the internet to its knees if they were off.
You don't need to take down that many major nodes for everybody else to become suddenly over-congested and fundamentally useless.
Real reason: So they can shut down the internet in the vicinity of major protests, and thus keep people from tweeting and streaming video when the police start firing tear gas into the crowd and breaking a few bones.
Real reason: So they can shut down the internet in the vicinity of major protests, and thus keep people from tweeting and streaming video when the police start firing chemical weapons into the crowd and breaking a few bones.
FTFY.
Getting tired of society trying to wrap a nice, pretty bow on that particularly ugly duck.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
If I were the US Government, I wouldn't bother about shutting off the Internet, I'd bother about getting people to stop attaching critical infrastructure to it. The internet is not and was never designed to be a secure network. It's a lot more like a common sewer.
The fact that this is being discussed shows that the real problem is that an agency as secretive and powerful as the DHS even exists. Remember: J. Stalin was a minor figure in the Russian revolution, but once he gained control of the consolidated bureaucracy of the early USSR, he used that bureaucracy to exile, murder, imprison or otherwise neutralize his political opposition and made himself dictator for life. It is almost impossible for a single individual to defend himself from a large bureaucracy.
Until recently, the best defense that a US citizen had against attack from govt bureaucracy was the competitive turf guarding behavior of the different agencies which limited the power of any single agency. The consolidation of bureaucratic power under the single authority of the DHS has eroded that defense. An additional danger is the, thanks to Snowden, now widely publicized adoption of big database and analytics techniques by the US govt. Mark my words, if the DHS is not disbanded, then eventually the head of the DHS will become the most powerful person in the country, able to determine who gets elected to every office or even cancel elections and with a virtually unlimited ability to coerce any US citizen to do anything.
" a governemt has the authority to make it so."
Perhaps you are confusing power with authority. My government has the power to prevent me having any contact with the outside world. My government has no such authority.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
In your scenario, a politician is arguing with a judge about a law the politician is supposedly *going to* introduce as a bill, and the judge is objecting that he, personally, will never allow that? Then the politician finds a judge to sign off on this bill approved by the head of the FDA (not even submitted to the legislature at that point), and boom, it's a law?
You've made a total hash of how the U.S. political and legal system work, and your scenario makes no sense at all. How in the world did this get modded insightful?
Just to clarify;
Politician writes bill.
Politician may look for co-sponsors to strengthen the bill's chances.
Politician proposes bill, or attaches it as an amendment to some other bill.
Legislature debates bill and passes it or not.
Bill becomes law.
FDA, private citizens, or other interested parties may choose to sue to overturn the law.
THEN the judiciary gets involved.
I'm still trying to figure out why we even have a need for a kill switch.
The answer to that seems fairly apparent: To prevent or stifle a popular uprising against those in charge. Our government no longer works for us. In many ways, it works against us.