Presidential authority to shut down / seize public internet?

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jimpeel

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Can't tell if this is Chicken Little or if it is credible posturing. The bill does, indeed, exist; but does it grant the overarching authority the author claims? Having seen other laws taken to their wildest extreme -- Seizure and Forfeiture and RICO would be good examples -- it is not beyond the pale; and assurances that it won't gives little comfort.

It seems that this new bill is in the works; and it takes the place of a former attempt to do this last spring. Who is in office is not the problem. The problem is the content of the bill and the authority it endows on the president, whoever s/he may be. If the power is innocuous then <shrug>. If not ...

The story:

LINK

The pertinent portion of the bill:

LINK

An e-mail from Jena Longo, deputy communications director for the Senate Commerce committee states the following:

The president of the United States has always had the constitutional authority, and duty, to protect the American people and direct the national response to any emergency that threatens the security and safety of the United States. The Rockefeller-Snowe Cybersecurity bill makes it clear that the president's authority includes securing our national cyber infrastructure from attack. The section of the bill that addresses this issue, applies specifically to the national response to a severe attack or natural disaster. This particular legislative language is based on longstanding statutory authorities for wartime use of communications networks. To be very clear, the Rockefeller-Snowe bill will not empower a "government shutdown or takeover of the Internet" and any suggestion otherwise is misleading and false. The purpose of this language is to clarify how the president directs the public-private response to a crisis, secure our economy and safeguard our financial networks, protect the American people, their privacy and civil liberties, and coordinate the government's response.
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Technically impossible.

Even if the government took over all of the backbone links here in the US, it would only be a couple of hours before all of the routers updated to go around those nodes.

You can get from anywhere, to anywhere, via any route... some just take longer than others.

Hell, the Iranians couldn't even do this... and they tried pretty hard.

Short of seizing everyone's computer, there's no way to do this. The only way that goverments have been able to deny access to the internet is by controlling the basic hardware.
 
I am not an IT guy by profession but have just enough knowledge to be dangerous ;)

While there are some governments that do manage to control the ISP's in their countries, (China springs to mind)
I do not believe that even the US Government has the logistics to make that happen at this stage of the game. (that horse has already left the barn)

The countries that control the internet content their citizens have access to, controlled the infrastructure from the ground up, don't see that being possible from the top down. as I said, the logistics would be impossible.

Also, this bill seems to only be concerned with .gov assets, certainly the "abuse" factor should be carefully considered, but the internet in the US is a monster that is not likely to be caged anytime soon. IMHO
 
I don't put anything past this administration...
The 'net czar could just order the service providers to shut it down.
Don't none of ya'll fergit that Al Gore invented the whole dern thing.
Brent
 
Even if the government took over all of the backbone links here in the US, it would only be a couple of hours before all of the routers updated to go around those nodes.

You can get from anywhere, to anywhere, via any route... some just take longer than others.
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Exactly. As more "P2P" based networking exists every day, you can literally get to anywhere, from anywhere.

As an analogy, lets suppose the .gov decides to close the US Interstate Highway system, I can still get where I am going...just not on the freeway.
 
The 'net czar could just order the service providers to shut it down.
Don't none of ya'll fergit that Al Gore invented the whole dern thing.
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He also invented the hole in the ozone layer, and global wa...er, climate change, What a guy !

(I hate to admit we grew up just 20 miles apart, in basically the same community)
 
The countries that control the internet content their citizens have access to, controlled the infrastructure from the ground up, don't see that being possible from the top down. as I said, the logistics would be impossible.
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Bingo. There's your answer.
 
Whatever you may think of the man and what he does, within this venue where facts rein supreme and rumors and exaggerations serve us little purpose beyond patting our own backs, Al Gore never claimed to have invented the internet. He said that he took the initiative of creating the internet. Meaning through his legislative record the internet was allowed to flourish and evolve from a military program to what it is today. A bit of boasting, but he was responding to a question about what's he got to offer us as a president.

That said, what does any of this have to do with firearms?
 
I have no clue if anyone would ever want to use or abuse such a law but I'll address the technical side. The answer is yes it's quite it's possible to limit internet communication to and between average citizens for the duration of a national emergency. For example if whoever it is wanted to shutdown the vast majority of email, blogs, and unfriendly news websites then all it takes is a visit or a call to a mere handful of ISPs and a few co-location sites. Everyone's web servers are co-located at a mere dozen or so physical sites.

That's the blunt instrument method. But it's also possible to "poison" the top-level domain servers so that non-corporate and non-government email, politically incorrect blog sites, and politically incorrect websites resolve to bogus IP addresses. That effectively selectively shuts them down. This takes time to trickle down, a couple of days at least unless ISPs are instructed to flush their DNS caches - which would reduce the time required to hours. Your attempts to reach hotmail, yahoo mail, rushlimbaugh.com, michellemalkin.com, or foxnews.com (or Glock.com ;)) could be met with "404 page not found".

The technically savvy would eventually be able to access off shore sites but that takes time and does nothing for the vast majority of folks. Yes it's easily doable if you have the power of the government behind you. Stopping massive distributed attacks like they claim to want to do is much much harder. It'll be interesting to see where this bill goes.

Anyway back to jawboning about guns.
 
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As more "P2P" based networking exists every day, you can literally get to anywhere, from anywhere.
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Poppycock.

You need central repositories to obtain torrent or other key files for P2P systems to function. You can't just "browse the cloud." Not possible yet.

And... even if you could browse the cloud of P2P clients, you still need a centralized backbone to get there. There are core datalinks in this country that are easily severed. I used to work for a web hosting company in Phoenix... when working from home in a Phoenix suburb, EVERY ONE OF MY DATA PACKETS actually went from my home, to a routing station down the street, all the way back to Los Angeles, then to downtown Phoenix.

Sever that link and all of Arizona (and a good bit of the "flyover" Rockies states) will be severely crippled with regard to internet access.

Frankly, I can think of 3 datacenters I know of in the US that if any 1 of them went down, it would cause immense chaos to the internet backbone of the world.

There probably aren't more than 500 or so core datalinks that if you severed them, the internet would be devastatingly impossible to navigate even for trained professionals with no need for name resolution or search engine use.

I think that if you could come up with a replacement for IP addressing that included geographical location info (GPS lat/long coupled with IP, perhaps) and increased the broadcast strength of the 802.11 protocols, you could hash out a new form of wireless web, but routing would require some insane computations and LOTS of hops, and name resolution would be extremely difficult.

On a separate but related note... if a critical national security asset is located on the public internet: TAKE IT OFF! There is zero reason to have nuclear control systems on the same network that I use to download music. It's very easy to set up private intranets that have no physical link at all to the internet. Given the satellite and radio assets our government has, it should be simple.

There's no reason to EVER shut down the greatest communication medium the world has ever seen... unless it's to shut up the people themselves.
 
There's no reason to EVER shut down the greatest communication medium the world has ever seen... unless it's to shut up the people themselves.
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That's what Pelosi would like to do. This Democrat regime we are living under is all about control, and regardless of whether or not they can totally succeed at doing anything to ruin our lives,they will continue to try. :mad:
 
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Brent
 
Reopened

The thread is reopened.

I believe the issue of the government seizing control of the Internet during "an emergency" has serious First Amendment bearing, and rightfully belongs in the CR portion of our forum. IF the discussion can be focused on that issue, and not wander off into endless repetition of how much and how strongly we dislike the people involved.

The high road is narrow. Lets keep it between the ditches people. Posts containing language outside of L&CR Forum rules will not be tolerated, and that includes how you say things, not just what you say. If you aren't sure, read the sticky. If you are still in doubt, ask the mods.

Now, how do we balance the govenment's valid authority to control industries vital to "national security" against "Congress shall make no law....freedom of the press....."?

There is, after all, technically, a war on. During WWII, govt controlled in direct fashion many industries deemed "vital to the war effort". Nobody batted an eye, or if they did, it came to naught.

We are not in the same situation today, and are very unlikely to ever be in that same situation again. However, the precedent is set. That will not be changed. What we have to determine is what limits a free people will set upon government power at what level of emergency.

After Katrina, officials took firearms from citizens in New Orleans, even though the law did not give them that authority. Because their boss told them to. End result, after years of legal wrangling, laws were passed specifically prohibiting these kinds of actions during specified emergancies.

Unless we get something in law, specifically limiting the governments authority to "take over" the Internet, and at what level of emergency they are allowed to do this, if they are at all, they will gladly take as much power as they can get, and use it at the lowest level of provocation practical.

Anything less than that is an insupportable idea to me. Leaving out the technical issues of "can it be done", the legal and moral issues of "should it be done, and if so, when?" are the overridding priorities. Because if they claim, and are allowed, the authority to do it, eventually they will find a way to do it.

We cannot allow them to sneak this in while everyone if focused on health care, because if they do, we lose more than we can afford.

Your thoughts?
 
I work for a local company that does allot of telephone work around several states.

The problem with things like this is it is cutting off your nose to spite your face. The Chinese economy has developed, for better or worse, around the restrictions on the local internet. The US economy has not. If you want to see the economy take a nosedive, just have them pull something like this.

At least where I work, this would shut down our remote monitoring and remote system administration for several hundred computers. I'd be spending my days running around diagnosing system trouble on site instead of the office people doing that and my going and installing upgrading systems.

With such actions, companies will start sending people home since there is no work for them to do or when the work they can do runs out. So we now have even more people who are not getting paid because of the government and have nothing better to do. Hmmmmm. I wonder what is going to happen?

Also, the internet does NOT have the redundancy that people think it does. When first envisioned by the military yes, but across much of the US, as you get close to the end user especially, this redundancy is absent as it is economically not viable.
 
I am glad that most, here, are thinking the way I was hoping. I was thinking about how they could do this, as one poster so aptly put it, from the top down.

I like the analogy of the interstate highway system and how one may still get from point A to point B without it. However ... the interstate highway system was not designed as a public way. It was designed as a military asset for any possible assault on the country and is literally on loan to the states. It was designed for the movement of men and materiel. It can be closed at any time there is a national emergency, such as invasion, as it was intended and designed. Many people who were not alive at the time of the building of the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System are unaware that the specifications of the system included that one mile in every five miles must be a straight line for the launching and landing of aircraft.

The Internet, however, is not even close to the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System, although the analogy is sound. Just as pirate radio, CB and ham radio, shortwave, microstations, et al, have always been used outside of government regulation, the Internet would simply become cellular based on a small scale communicating in the ether. Any attempts to stop it would simply be circumvented.

It seems that Washington now runs more on Senate and House rules which have endowed them with greater and greater power; and the Constitutional authority granted by the Constitution is being expanded extra-constitutionally. The Congress has granted more and more law-making authority to unelected bureaucrats through granted power to create regulations -- which are law.

When it comes to freedom, the free will always find a way; and the non-free will seek them out and join them.
 
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Just as pirate radio, CB and ham radio, shortwave, microstations, et al, have always been used outside of government regulation, the Internet would simply become cellular based on a small scale communicating in the ether. Any attempts to stop it would simply be circumvented.
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When it comes to freedom, the free will always find a way; and the non-free will seek them out and join them.
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Bingo!

Poppycock.

You need central repositories to obtain torrent or other key files for P2P systems to function. You can't just "browse the cloud." Not possible yet.
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Perhaps there is some "old school" technology you might want to look into, "packets" of info do not have to travel over a wire to be transmitted effectively.

It's very easy to set up private intranets that have no physical link at all to the internet.
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Indeed, it is. ;) As an aside, when I mentioned;

I am not an IT guy by profession
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Does not mean I am ignorant on the subject, merely that I no longer make my living at it. ;)

On a separate but related note... if a critical national security asset is located on the public internet: TAKE IT OFF! There is zero reason to have nuclear control systems on the same network that I use to download music.
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You may rest assured that this is not the security issue .gov has, but that is the way they wish it to "appear".

The "security issue" is freedom of thought and expression and, communication within that realm.

(read my first sig line for a clue) The very discussion we are having, and the relative ease with which we can have it, is a shining example of what is likely a "security issue".
 
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