Cyber Insanity

[TheFranklinParty]

A Senate bill (S.773) if passed would give the President of the United States the authority to declare a "cyber emergency" and close down the Internet by disconnecting users.

In addition, it will require professional IT people to be certified by the federal government, something that angers many IT technicians and those who believe in the First Amendment.

Having worked in the networking industry for two decades this borders on insanity. It is easier to do than you might think.

All ISPs end up connecting to one of 8 internet points of prescence in the US. These could be nationalized and shut off easily. The other issue is that the US owns and controls all 12 of the root DNS servers that allow people to find things by name. Shut them off and the global internet is effectively broken. Oh yeah, we also control address allocation as well. We could take a country off line by routing all traffic from that countries ip space to null with a few bgp entries.

This kind of control over our communication is crazy.

Reference: http://tinyurl.com/klq7yg

 

[Pandora]

What kind of emergency does he mean, I wonder.

Glenn Beck's website talking about the Czars?

 

[asur]

The DOD has contracts with all major ISP and phone companies.
Obama runs the DOD more or less, so maybe it could be done somewhat!

But what are they worried about?

 

[TheFranklinParty]

What kind of emergency does he mean, I wonder.

Glenn Beck's website talking about the Czars?

That is exactly the point. The idea is to prevent what Russia did to Georgia (the country not the state). They perpetrated a cyber attack that knocked out the entire governmental communications system. This is what we want to prevent from happening to us, but you don't need to give the President a "kill switch" to accomplish this. There are much more elegant methods that allow us to maintain an open Internet.