INTERNET KILLSWITCH ENGAGE!

[defrog]

ITEM: Senator Joseph Lieberman proposes a bill, the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act (PCNAA), which would grant POTUS unlimited power to shut down part or all of the Internet in the case of a cyberattack (just like the one in Die Hard 4.0, except it’ll be done by Chinese people!).

There’s been a lot of Interwubbery freakout about this – particularly from the conservative sector who seem to think this is Obama’s latest diabolical plot to take over the world.

Which is ironic, of course, since the PCNAA is a bipartisan creature (with Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) being a co-sponsor), as was its predecessor, the Cybersecurity Act of 2009, co-sponsored by Sen. John Rockefeller (D-WV) and Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME). So the idea of an Internet kill switch isn’t even all that new, let alone an exclusively liberal plot.

Tellingly, the Cybersecurity Act eventually dropped the kill switch provision, primarily because it was a stupid idea. It’s no less stupid now.

Never mind the more paranoid fears about Obama randomly turning off Glenn Beck’s 9.12 Project web servers or Sarah Palin’s Facebook page or whatever, or that an Internet kill switch is technologically implausible to begin with. Even if you could devise a kill switch mechanism of some kind, using it isn’t likely to thwart a hacker attack (especially one designed with that contingency in mind), and would arguably do more harm than good (not just in the US, but worldwide), as well as create more security problems than it purports to solve.

Indeed, even Lieberman has said the main advantage of having a kill-switch law is to protect Internet service providers from lawsuits. So, for example, if the President orders AT&T to shut down its entire data network to ward off a cyberattack, AT&T’s corporate customers can’t sue AT&T for damages due to the business losses they might have suffered during the shutdown.

Also, says Lieberman, China does it all the time, so why can’t we? This is war, after all.

Put country simple, we "need" an Internet kill switch because Lieberman wants his name on something that sounds bad-ass, and thinks America need a way to make sure anyone inconvenienced by it can’t sue anyone.

That’s not to say hacker attacks on “critical infrastructure” (whatever that means) aren’t a potential threat, whether they’re carried out by terrorists, rogue states or the Russian mafia. But the nature of the threat has been blown way out of proportion. The actual threat of a cyberwar can be easily prevented, or at least minimized, by keeping yr security patches up to date.

So all up, it’s a terrible and useless idea ... but perhaps for different reasons than you might be hearing on yr local news-talk radio station.

Flip the switch,

This is dF

Comments

[puffdoggydaddy.livejournal.com]

I'd be more worried about a future President Batshit Alaska having this power. A year ago, I would have said there was no way she could be elected. Watching the collective paranoid instability of a large percentage of the electorate makes me wonder though.

And the switch legislation keeps rising phoenix like out of the Homeland Security family of committees in Congress, so it wouldn't surprise me, despite its being a stupid idea, if it got onto the floor, into debate, and passed into law.

[def-fr0g-42.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't want any president of any party to have this kind of power either, regardless of how they used it. By any measure of common sense it's a terrible law that could only be written by people who have no clue how the Internet works.