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Comment by noonespecial | Hacker News Reader

Even if the Americans do decide that the president has the authority to "kill the internet", they get to use this power exactly once.

Then the rest of the world routes around it and doesn't let the US become a single point of failure again.

The reasonable side of the argument is that what they really want to be able to do is air-gap the US should it find itself under attack by the rest of the internet. Unfortunately, right now, so much of the internet routes through the US that doing this is almost the same thing as shutting down the internet.

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You are assuming that the idea is actually to "kill the Internet", and not that it is just horribly, horribly miscommunicated using that concept. What if instead of this they were saying something like "we may at some point need to kill all traffic from all ISPs going to any IP address with the ASN 31336 and a TCP destination port of 80 or 5151"?

This is absurd. If there's a valid reason justifying the kill switch, it should be clearly communicated by Lieberman. It is not the job of anyone here to ferret out Liberman's justifications; it is Lieberman's job to explain himself. He has a website. He makes frequent media appearances and he often communicates with journalists. If given all that, he remains completely incapable of communicating his ideas clearly, then he clearly is far too incompetent to be a US Senator.

Perhaps I'm wrong. Is there any reason to believe that Lieberman has been prevented from clearly explaining his ideas on his own website?

I'm not even a little bit interested in debating the merits of Joe Lieberman with you.

This is much more sinister, because people might let it slide.

If there's a legit reason to do this, can't Obama just ask the top tier ISPs to implement such a filter? Do we really need legislation to this effect?

Because the ISPs could just say "no".

This doesn't make any sense. We've already seen major telecoms roll over and participate in massive illegal government surveillance. And that didn't involve a war on American soil. We already understand exactly how this works: major telecom firms have enormous contracts with the federal government and/or pending regulatory issues before federal agencies. That gives them a huge incentive to do what the government wants, especially since the government can credibly promise to indemnify their illegal acts.

Given this history, WHICH JUST HAPPENED IN THE LAST FEW YEARS, there is no credible reason to believe that ISPs would "just say no" during a real national emergency.

In an actual war or emergency, what are the chances ISPs would refuse a presidential request? Are major ISPs typically stubborn and obstructionist in the face of major security threats, or cooperative?

To follow up on this point, a portion of revenue of most ISPs and telcos comes from contracts with the federal government.

In a time of emergency and war, a large multinational is not going to bite the (large and powerful) hand that feeds them.

A related current example is BP with the oil spill. BP could very well have said fuck you to the Obama administration and not set aside a compensation fund. However, this would have been done at the cost of current and future federal government contracts.

in an actual war or emergency, the president would issue one of those things called "executive orders" - basically laws that don't need to go through congress.

There is no justification for this bill to exist, other than because these senators decided "If China can do it, then why can't we?"

I'd rather we wait for this to actually occur before introducing new laws.

Wait for what? A nationwide calamity?

I'm kind of dumb....What type of calamity could possibly occur that would justify such an action?

Also, its frightening to see that people welcome the great firewall of america.

Yea that's a good question. What kind of event ARE we really talking about here? Do you have an example of something that might require this kind of response?

Is it really just for cyber attacks? What if we were in a war with, say, England. Would contact with them through the internet be cut off? I am guessing yes, but it's a really interesting thought.

Why would we cut off access to (say) China if we went to war with them over Taiwan? How would that help us?

What if we had the internet during WWII. Being able to communicate directly with the "enemies" through the internet would have been strange.

Strange in the "why are you my enemy if I'm talking to you just fine right now and you seem like a perfectly nice person" kind of way.

To the government, communicating in this way might threaten the public attitude of the war. However, I wonder if the age of information darkness is coming to a close.

You do realize that the President already has the capability to shut off all communications anywhere during a time of war if it's necessary for national security?

Meanwhile, you propose that this technical measure, which would do virtually nothing to prevent communications between motivated interested parties in and out of the US, is intended to stifle free communications. If so, this is a clunky and redundant way to accomplish that objective.

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