After the events in Egypt a closer look might be taken at proposed US Senate legislation unoffically called the internet kill bill. Senators Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Tom Carper (D-DE) have co-sponsored a bill (introduced in 2010) that might give the President the power to disconnect the internet. It is unclear if the President might already have this power under decade’s old legislation passed after Pearl Harbor.
Whether killing the internet is even possible is still debatable. However by reconfiguring network routers and making it difficult for them to reach IP addresses the Egyptian government effectively did to some degree kill their internet. Not quite a kill switch but a kill system that disrupted communications between those organizing and participating in anti-gov protests.
In a statement after the events in Egypt Senators Lieberman, Collins, and Carper released a statement defending the bill saying in part
“they will ensure that any legislation that moves in this Congress contains explicit language prohibiting the President from doing what President Mubarak did.”
However Sen. Lieberman’s earlier statements offer little similar reassurance. This is from a 2010 interview where he claims critics are spreading “total misinformation” about the bill while he uses a less than comforting example to describe the law's function
“We need the capacity for the president to say, Internet service provider, we’ve got to disconnect the American Internet from all traffic coming in from another foreign country… Right now, China, the government, can disconnect parts of its Internet in a case of war. We need to have that here, too.”
The internet kill bill joins so much other senate legislation good, bad and ugly that is stalled in the Senate. It may also be broken into bite sized pieces and added to spending bills. Many of the barriers are turf battles about which groups (DHS or military?) should have authority over civilian cyber security rather than issues of personal freedom and rights. US, county and local government IT officials note the problems an internet shutdown might cause. Law enforcement relies heavily information flowing from the internet and would have to rely on radio during a shutdown. Also some municipalities have emergency management on twitter feeds.
and other essential functions of daily life are rapidly being committed to internet management. Economics will most certainly mean that, before long, paper-system redundancies will be eliminated.
I remember reflecting on this with alarm the first time I went into the bank with my lil’ ol’ passbook (was that in the ’80’s?) only to be told that computers had made paper records a thing of the past.
while driving to our southern NE neighbors for meetings I stopped for fuel ony to get ‘network’ errors on my work credit card. I had enough cash the cover the gas, but I was then nearly penniless heading into the wilds of MA and CT. I stopped at my nearest bank branch and grabbed some $$ in case those errors were widespread…. happily I didn’t need the extra $ aside from tolls… but it did remind me how fragile our economy and communications could be – especially as I was reading about events in Egypt.
The public square has moved to the mall, where you can be arrested for pamphletting, and the internet seems to be moving that way too. Freedom of speech is worthless if there is no place to speak and to gather, and no networks to tweet and text on. We already have tools in place to stifle dissent – PayPal, Amazon, and ISPs have shut out WikiLeaks without any due process. That is the beautiful thing about letting the market rule the web – there’s no backstop that ensures the free flow of data (speech, money, whatever) continues regardless of the message.