The government in your internet
In the event of cybersecurity emergency, they want to shut down. From Tam, who notes:
the oft-derided USA-PATRIOT Act is still with us. I guess they only hate it during election season.
4 Responses to “The government in your internet”
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August 31st, 2009 at 9:47 am
I guess Obama and the Feds want to imitate President Madagascar and SHUT DOWN EVERYTHING.
August 31st, 2009 at 3:43 pm
That is a great plan! Wait until they are hit and the hackers have control, and then shut down private business networks to manage an issue which damage has been done at that point. Why is it the very people that loose our national security secrets on a yearly basis, get hacked from China, and like McCain don’t know much about the internet, have so much interest in controlling it for those of us that do?
There is only one way for infrastructure to remain secure, and that is not to put our secrets on laptops, flash drives, or anything else that can be taken from a facility. Any information or power grids need be connected by a LAN and not a WAN and the problem of cyber security is solved, unless the attack comes from within which is much easier to control, and defend against.
Like anything else it is not about protection, it is about the power to control.
August 31st, 2009 at 5:20 pm
I thought this was overhyped when it was introduced before the election, and I still do. (I actually read the bill at the time it was first being discussed.)
The only real potential abuse of the “control the internet” parts is that the State could redefine “vital” and “emergency” to suit its ends.
Of course, A) that wouldn’t stand up to an actual legal challenge and B) if they were doing such a Giant-Power-Grab that A) didn’t matter, they wouldn’t need this bill to let it happen – they could just do it illegally or by pressuring the backbone providers hard enough.
Contra blount, if serious backbone systems get compromised, it’s not just a matter of “shutting down once the damage has been done”, it’s the first step in fixing it. DDOS zombie hosts on the big backbones, attacking any sort of vital infrastructure (or just clogging the entire network) are something it’s kinda important to fix, and instantly – and currently there’s no legal way to tell e.g. AT+T it has to turn it off right now; naturally they want to fix things in the way least disruptive to their business.
The two incentives are not perfectly aligned, and there are real potential national security issues with the real “critical networks”.
The bill might not be a good idea, but it’s not, in fact, an obviously inappropriate power grab, merely as it’s written.
September 1st, 2009 at 8:51 am
That’s the whole point. If it can be reinterpreted, it will be, sooner or later. I can’t quite believe that those supporting this are naive enough to be unaware of it.