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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."
First po
This is ridiculous - a bunch of hype. There's no such thing as an Internet kill sw
"However, the court left the door open for the agency to appeal the ruling.""
I never understand this thinking. I am under the impression that when a judgement goes against you, you can appeal the decision. The court is set up already for that thinking so what or how does this court do something different. When I read that I get the feeling that the "Court" felt ugly for their ruling and really really hopes that aggrieved party will appeal.
I do hope they don't or if they do, they fail for I would love to know about a switch that can "kill" the internet. A system designed to route around such devices.
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Just keep voting for the one-party-scam, suckers. You deserve whatever you get at this point.
Not ever really having considered this scenario before, I may be missing some pitfalls that are obvious to other people, but it seems like a consumer-level mesh network might be a good solution to a scenario where they are actually able to develop an internet kill switch, especially in cities, where the space between nodes would (hopefully) be small. I know, at least at the beginning, the OLPC project was using something. Would that be viable? What other technologies are worth pursuing in this vein, that are available right now?
Can someone explain to me the benefit of an internet kill switch? And how DHS is the appropriate department for its implementation?
None of us know everything. Therefore we're all naïve.
If you were the US Government, how would you go about completely (or functionally completely) shutting off the Internet? Could it be done?
Considering that the US government has nigh exclusive control over the core DNS servers (not to mention countless backdoors in every ISP's terminal room), yea, it could totally be done.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
There is no kill switch! It's a !@#$ NO CARRIER
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Seems like a strange ruling to me. How is something intended to prevent bombs going off not to do with saving lives? I'm all for interpreting things like this narrowly, but the fact that you don't know in advance which lives you are saving doesn't seem like a sensible argument to me...
What we really need is a kill switch on the DHS, and the other out-of-control TLAs
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It forces you to sign up with Comcast and waits for their lawyers to attack you!
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The Internet Kill switch is located on the twentieth sub-floor of the White House, in a small room right beside the cot Dick Cheney hid under in 2001 for three weeks. The switch is enclosed in a nondescript beige controller box with a large round red button that blinks with the pulse of the internet. A sign above reads, only switch off in case of emergency, or alien invasion.
Let's just hope Jen doesn't drop the internet box.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
But could they shut off the rest of the world as well?
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.
If you kill all of the people, the posting stops. Consider the fact that the only time the internet can actually harm the government rather than help it is during a revolution. Governments' war on its own people continues.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
At that instant, US citizen's protected rights are constitutionally violated by a deliberate government action.
Turning off the Internet kills your microphone, news print and mail in one swift blow. That silences voice.
The lawsuit is to try and release "Standard Operating Procedure 303".
Which would make the entire 'net 404. . . .
"They have made their decision, now let them enforce it"
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
You obviously have an Intelligence Quotient higher than your shoe size. To bad the top echelons of "management" in this country can't say the same. Our cyber security looks like an episode of Keystone Cops, updated with technological gadgets.
"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
the government starts telling me i have to disclose my internet turbo switch?
Good people go to bed earlier.
DHS was granted 30 days before they have to release the document, to allow time for an appeal.
You can always appeal, but it sometimes an appeal would be pointless because it would be too late.
In this case, plaintiff wants a document released. Normally, that would mean the document would be released immediately.
How do you appeal a decision to release a document AFTER it's been released, though? Plaintiff is going to publish the information.
If DHS wins the appeal, would plaintiff be ordered to unpublish it?
In such cases, a court will grant a "stay", meaning everything stays as it is until the appeals court gets the case or time runs out.
Give Mudge a terminal, a case of beer, and 30 minutes.
In today's America, the words "telecom" and "internet" aren't quite synonymous, but if you pretended that they were, you wouldn't be far wrong. All of my internet activity is carried by a telecom. The alternatives include cable, satellite, and radio - all of which are dependent on telecoms. Your satellite transceiver can talk to the satellite, but where is the signal going to go from there? AT&T is shut down. Depending on protocols aboard the satellite, you may be connected to a European, or Asian, or Australian server, but queries to CONUS will simply be ignored.
"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
It's narrow mindedness in a government institutions, a common malady.
The DHS sees a need to stop some activity or other, and this makes perfect sense in context. One only has to look at the Syria and Egypt for examples of how this is used in practice - if the US ever descends into armed revolt, the switch will disrupt revolutionary communications and make it easier for the government to regain control. The military has its own, separate channels of communication.
Like all government institutions, it's narrow minded. They only think of themselves and their (DHS's) own needs, without regard to anything outside of their remit. Turning off the internet will have massive consequences to the economy locally and worldwide, but that is considered unimportant. There is no consideration of the action "in context" or the ramifications thereof, it simply achieves the goal.
They need this functionality, and other considerations be damned.
A recent post asked about "fear" and how it's used by the government to control people, but fear works in reverse as well. The government's actions are unsustainable (at the very least, economically) and it's control over the people is rapidly coming to an end. They're terrified of the end-game, and are putting pre-emptive measures into place ahead of time.
As someone previously said, elected officials are cutting everything except checks to supporters. If they stop handouts to supporters their control will fail. If cutting services causes massive unrest, they will fail.
They are between a rock and a hard place and getting squeezed harder every day. It will be interesting to see the end game when it happens.
(Look to the first month-or-two of 2014 as a possible start-date. That's when budget/debt limit talks start anew, and it's when everyone's health insurance costs will double. That's only a possibility, but next summer is looking really good for massive protests.)
There's plenty of DNS servers (both root servers, gTLD servers, and ccTLD servers) located outside of US jurisdiction.
While an unexpected shutdown could certainly cause some disruption both inside and outside the US, I'm not sure how effective a global DNS shutdown would be -- there's been significant fractions of the root DNS infrastructure that's been taken offline due to attacks in the past and the system continued to work without interruption. Even if there was a disruption, it's likely that non-US operators of root/gTLD/ccTLD servers would setup workarounds fairly quickly and the rest of the world would go about its business.
Anyway, it's something the government could ever do *once*. The instant they do it, the world changes and would highly unlikely to depend on a system managed by a single country.
Shutting down something like Google, for example, would likely be far more disruptive.
Dude, the US Government was able to get malware planted in Iranian centrifuge controllers that were supposed to be air-gapped. I wouldn't be surprised in Windows 8 is pre-programmed to cut itself off the internet when the spooks say so.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
If you were the US Government, how would you go about completely (or functionally completely) shutting off the Internet? Could it be done?
Considering that the US government has nigh exclusive control over the core DNS servers (not to mention countless backdoors in every ISP's terminal room), yea, it could totally be done.
I was under the impression the internet by its very design would route around 'problems.' Can the US Government really shut down every pipe? DNS is irrelevant, in my opinion. It's important, no doubt, but shutting DNS does not shut the internet. Just makes it substantially harder to use.
Everybody has been complaining about the high cost of American government without really talking about what you get with it.
Makes it seem as if we should cut the price of government since we don't need it.
But what actually happens when the govt shuts down? Business loses money.
If business is running the government, or rich people are running the government, then it will cost them money if they shut down the internet.
Economics is a pain in the butt. You actually _can_ dominate everyone else in your area for a while (or longer if some other country supports you the way China props up North Korea) but you can't actually be better off than other countries. Being rich in North Korea means being able to get a ripe banana.
The rulez of economics apply whether you are rich or poor. Cutting off the internet means shutting down profits.
That isn't going to happen for every long.
Dude, the US Government was able to get malware planted in Iranian centrifuge controllers that were supposed to be air-gapped. I wouldn't be surprised in Windows 8 is pre-programmed to cut itself off the internet when the spooks say so.
The Blue Screen of Dominance.
My windows is able to shut itself off from the internet at random.
When you read, "We need an Internet emergency off switch", think: "We need a printing press emergency off switch."
The fear, presumably something similar to using cell phones to trigger bombs, is certainly serious, but it's seductive rationalizations like this that lead the Founding Fathers to their absolutist stance for freedoms. History is the study of power struggles between the quick talkers who can sway masses.
There is a way to deal with this -- the deliberately laborious process of amending the Constitution. If it's a good idea, most will agree, and will agree over years of discussion, rather than a transient, small majority, the historical realm of charismatic demagogues.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
A QPSS signal on 5Watts is purportedly detectable all over the world.. All you need is a microcontroller board, like the Arduino, and a little bit of hardware, and you could communicate far below the noise floor..The trick with QPSS is that each bit may take several/tens of seconds to transmit each bit on a very narrow frequency (the -174dBm noise floor reduces to -184dBm). If you lock your reference oscillator to GPS, you can synchronize both transceivers.
There's only a handful of major pipes, the so-called "internet backbone" interconnecting major ISPs. Shut those down and you've brought the 'net to its knees.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
They will appeal the ruling because it's so patently obvious it involves the root DNS servers. Otherwise, the UN really will have something to to on with regards of taking away control from the US. Which BTW, sounds like a good idea until you realize what the alternatives would be. From bad to worse no doubt.
Oh well, it was an interesting experiment while it lasted. The single interconnected world wide web that is. A real shame it is!
Life is not for the lazy.
You're presuming that the point would be to protect critical infrastructure. It's not impossible that that is the actual intent and the congressional technology advisors are simply incompetent or ignored, but that seems a foolish way to bet. Look at what's been going on on the 'net in the last few years - the Occupy movement, damning information released by wikileaks and others, the Arab Spring. My bet is that there is at least a faction within the US government that wants some insurance against online-coordinated popular uprisings. That is the kill switch is not intended to protect the *country*, it's intended to protect the *government*, or a faction therein.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Political contributions are protected speech, but access to Internet-based services? Eh, not so much.
Thanks Oba
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Suppose a couple wanted to have a baby. They spent a year planing for a baby and trying to get pregnant. They get pregnant and they are decorating
the nursery, etc. Then, three months pregnant, she changes her mind and wants to kill the kid and go back to partying all night like she did in college.
Pretty quickly, it's going to be too late to appeal a decision either way.
What? There shouldn't be a case at all - while the father certainly has some steak[sic] in the game, he certainly has no ownership or power over the woman's body. If the laws and regulations in her area allow for her to have an abortion, it is her right to do so and no one else's decision. It's ridiculous that these kinds of cases have ever even occurred, but then again we live in a country where women are still treated by many of the old-thought people as property, possessions, and pawns to manipulate and direct as they choose.
The father certainly should be involved in any kind of decision like that, but at the end of the day it shouldn't be anything a court would consider hearing as it should be thrown out on the grounds that it's the woman's choice.
I can see it now. "We're going to have to install interrupting devices at key points on the internet.". And OBTW, when they're not interrupting the flow of data they're sending copies of it all to NSA Utah. And we're all paying for it. What a crock.
+1 Sadly Plausible
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This is so dangerous. Shutting down the INTERNET worldwide would have more drastic affects than a small nuclear explosion would have. Even if you don't think the top echelons would use this for nefarious purposes, I doubt the US government is competent enough to manage these abilities. I back this up with a bankrupt economy; we're stretched so thin and the government isn't even capable of keeping a website operational, and the NSA isn't strong enough to protect from people literally just walking away with classified information. No one should have this power.
The switch ought to be tested periodically to make sure it is in full working order modeled after monthly testing of the emergency broadcast system here in the states.
Given cataclysmic apocalypse sure to ensue if kill switch were needed then failed to work properly we should demand it be well tested.
...the cited source is rather Sketchy. Looks like it's the house organ for a group of right-wing whack jobs.
Mobile phone save video, they can simply save it and transmit later. They would have to conficate *all* phone on a massive scale. Not something which would be easy to do, considering how easy it would be to hide one somewhere in the street, and considering how this would be told 100* time over tweeter and facebook as soon as internet come back. And it would have to, or do irreparable damage.
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Your opinion isn't necessarily unreasonable, but the point is that if the first judge disagreed, she couldn't very well appeal the decision, could she?
Estimating it takes on average four months to get a court date, she's 7 months along at the first hearing. When the appeal hearing occurred, the baby would be two months old. If she "wins" the appeal, does that mean she kills the 2 month old infant? Obviously not, so there would no effective appeal. That's the point of my post.
> The father certainly should be involved in any kind of decision like that
Funny you say that, while saying that regardless of the facts, he has absolutely zero right to even alert the judicial system to what's going on.
> where women are still treated by many of the old-thought people as property, possessions, and pawns to manipulate and direct as they choose.
But you insist on treating babies very lives as property to be destroyed at whim? Odd.
In my personal opinion, facts matter. Let's say we have a typical happy family of four. White picket fence
and all that. Their third child is due in one month. Then she falls back into smoking crack cocaine, the
nemesis she thought she had defeated fifteen years prior. In that factual situation, I believe dad has a
duty to protect his children.
...an independent Internet:
Someone else(TM) e.g. a non-client state government might commandeer all that great surveillance tech the US has been inventing and turning loose on its population. And then our current 'The Privileged That Be' would be reduced to being just another set of the watched and herded sheep.
All they would need to do is turn off their "Man in the Middle" machines and the links would be severed. Kind of like turning off your network switch.
Only Captain Picard has that ability!
Exactly what I was thinking... Some snickering NSA nerds handing over the "kill switch" to the judge... "Here you go... Careful!"
No, no, I think people are getting this all wrong. The DHS internet "kill switch" doesn't kill the internet, it kills the users! Either selectively, or in one big all-inclusive purge! And that's why they don't want anyone finding out about the details. I mean it's obvious, when you think about it... But don't worry, they're so incompetent they'll probably just blow themselves up if they ever try to actually use the technology. Come to think of it, that should be the new DHS motto: "Safety Through Incompetence". I feel safer already.
DNS is irrelevant, in my opinion. It's important, no doubt, but shutting DNS does not shut the internet. Just makes it substantially harder to use.
Your opinion doesn't matter here; "substantially harder to use" effectively means "shut down" in this case, as the vast, vast, vast majority of internet users lack the technical know-how to surf without DNS.
Plus, you seem to be ignoring the whole "NSA backdoors in every ISP terminal room" angle. That one matters too.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Does the opposite also apply? That is, if the father-to-be gets cold feet, should he be able to disown any and all rights and responsibilities towards the kid? Because it seems like being potentially stuck paying child support for almost two decades is a larger inconvenience than carrying the child for nine months. So, on the basis of equality, should a "legal abortion" be possible in the same circumstances than a physical one (which, I agree, is anytime the parent-to-be wants to)?
Also, does every discussion online turn to abortion eventually? Is Midwife's Law the Godwin's Law for modern America ?-)
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Something tells me the US government has little to no interest in having the ability to shut down internet access outside its own borders, for a variety of reasons.
First, they know that their affiliate clandestine organizations in said other countries (like the GCHQ) will happily do that for them.
Secondly, this is DHS we're talking about - their entire purview of authority is within US borders.
Finally, the kinds of shit DHS would pull that would give them cause to shut down communications are pretty much exclusively American problems (Not that dissent or a violent reaction to the declaration of martial law couldn't happen in other countries, but rather, unless it happens State-side DHS wouldn't give half a fuck).
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Just use the internet kill switch.. that'll unpublish it fast enough!
Your opinion doesn't matter here; "substantially harder to use" effectively means "shut down" in this case, as the vast, vast, vast majority of internet users lack the technical know-how to surf without DNS.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
There are no man in the middle machines. The taps they use for monitoring are passive, not active. If the tap goes down, it has no effect on the data transferring across the wire that's being tapped.
...assuming it only kills off Facebook and Zynga. Imagine...people WORKING instead of MASTURBATING TO GIFT TRACTORS (with a Google tab open to switch to in case the boss walks in!)
Blair? Seriously? lol, I think maybe your credibility just took a hit.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Those weren't cable breaks a few years back, you know.
You can't disclose plans when you've already installed it.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
No problem. The Internet sees kill switches as damage and routes around them.