Cyber Commander Says It's 'Not Realistic' To Shut Down Internet (washingtonexaminer.com)

An anonymous reader links to a report on Washington Examiner: It simply would not be possible to shut down areas of the Internet that terrorists use to conduct malicious activity, the head of U.S. Cyber Command told a Senate panel on Tuesday. "In a very simplistic way, people ask why can't we shut down that part of the Internet. ... Why are we not able to infiltrate that more?" Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., asked Cyber Command leader Adm. Mike Rogers during a hearing on the agency's budget for fiscal 2017. Manchin maintained it was a common question from his constituents. "I've had people ask me, can't you just stop it from that area of the world where all the problems are coming, be it Syria or in parts of Iraq or Iran," he said. "I'm not just trying to find an answer, because that question is asked like shut her down, like you do your telephone, but it doesn't work that way," Manchin concluded.

Comments

Resilient by design

[FrankHaynes]

Knuckleheads. ARPAnet and MilNet were designed to be resilient against centralized attack and outages.

"THE INTERNET IS DOWN!! THE INTERNET IS DOWN!!"

Re:Resilient by design

[guruevi]

No we don't. The Internet considers censoring as damage and routes around it. Each country has telephone lines and satellite communications. If you shut down the "Internet" from routing through it's common carriers (fiber etc) someone can hang a few thousand 56k modems on their phone systems and call in to their neighbors or even through the censoring country and connect all their traffic that way. Same goes for satellite, just bounce it around a few times and it can come from anywhere.

That's how Syrians and Iranians were still able to connect after their countries shut down their internets.

Re:Resilient by design

[Ungrounded Lightning]

ARPAnet and MilNet were designed to be resilient against centralized attack and outages

During the evolution from those networks to the current, commercialized, information utility, much of that design was abandoned. We have migrated from an everything-is-redundantly-multiconnected, route around failures, survive a nuclear exchange system to a hierarchy, with a distinction between core and edge, where loss of certain boxes can shut down 10,000 to 100,000 end user sites.

(That's why those boxes are designed with internal reduncancy, like a telephone exchange. And I know them intimately, having spent over a decade designing parts of them.)

The core/backbone does retain some of the features of the Internet's cold-war-survival origin (though the transition to fiber and physical ring layouts made that more vulnerable to multipoint failures, as well.) So some of it still has part of the old robustness.

Then there are new services which added new dependencies (and sometimes new surprises when something goes down or goes away and a lot of stuff breaks).

And to top it off, the discussion is not about government actors managing to taking the net down, but identifying and surgically cutting off a designated portion of it.

So arguing from the characteristics of the robust-against-nukes network design we once had - and haven't had for decades - isn't particularly germaine.

Re:Crappy headline - forgot "areas of"

[SJHillman]

We can have Nigeria pay for it.

Re:YEs, it does work that way

[mrbester]

If you cut the link cables to Europe are you cutting off Europe from you or are you really cutting yourself off from Europe?

Re:Cyber Command?

[tnk1]

His title is Commander, US Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM), which is a unified sub-command of the US Military. Calling him "Cyber Commander" is a stupid journalistic oversimplification, it's not his actual title.

Of course, you can always tell government drones when they refer to "cyber" anything, but that is just the way it goes.

Re:YEs, it does work that way

[wyHunter]

If the channel tunnel is closed, it means the Continent is isolated.