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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
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.
I think prejudice refers to whether or not you can make the claims again. If a claim is dismissed because it is without merit, it will usually be with prejudice, meaning any future claim on that point will be consisted pre-judged and dismissed. If a claim is dismissed due to some procedural issue, it may be without prejudice so you can try again later.
Whether or not you have leave to appeal is separate.
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.
Let's just hope Jen doesn't drop the internet box.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
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
"Can someone explain to me the benefit of an internet kill switch?"
Media blackout. A populace ignorant of goings on is easier to control.
"And how DHS is the appropriate department for its implementation?"
Fact is there should be zero reason for an internet kill switch in the first place. There should be zero critical systems internet facing, which makes the argument to protect against terrorist attack to our infrastructure and critical systems moot. Which leads me to believe the only reason for one is to control the population, or rather control the data the population has access to, read media black out.
DHS nor any department should have need for it's implementation, nor should any department control it should one actually exist.
This right here is the best reason I can come up with to remove US control over any portion of the net, this includes hosting and services located in the US.
And yes I am an ashamed American, ashamed of what my country has become.
DHS SUCK IT BITCHES!
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
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 not sure how they'd do it physically. If we look at the internet for what it actually is by definition - a network is a bunch of computers connected to other computes, the internet is a bunch of networks connected to other networks - the internet is actually privately owned, even at the peering level of tier 1 ISP's.
I suppose you could bring it down by having the national guard (or whoever) commandeer a major NOC (network operations center) of a tier 1 ISP and then fudge the BGP tables of all of their major peering points worldwide (or nationwide if you prefer,) but the links wouldn't be physically broken. Other ISP's could compensate by just ignoring those peers. The customers of that ISP and its client ISPs would be down for sure, but not everybody.
I'm still trying to figure out why we even have a need for a kill switch. A terror attack on SCADA systems? Just require SCADA systems have a communications kill switch, then you don't need an internet kill switch.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
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.