One step closer to total control

Wow Communism FTW!

"In the original bill they empowered the president to essentially turn off the Internet in the case of a 'cyber-emergency,' which they didn't define," said Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, which represents the telecommunications industry.

"We think it's a very bad idea ... to put in legislation," he told FOXNews.com.

Clinton said the new version of the bill that surfaced this week is improved from its first draft, but troubling language that was removed was replaced by vague language that could still offer the same powers to the president in case of an emergency.

"The current language is so unclear that we can't be confident that the changes have actually been made," he said.

The new legislation allows the president to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "non-governmental" computer networks and make a plan to respond to the danger, according to an excerpt published online -- a broad license that rights experts worry would give the president "amorphous powers" over private users.

"As soon as you're saying that the federal government is going to be exercising this kind of power over private networks, it's going to be a really big issue," Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told CNET News.

"Simply put, who has the expertise?" he told FOXNews.com in April. "It's the industry, not the government. We have a responsibility to increase and improve security. That responsibility cannot be captured in a government standard."


WE KNOW WHAT'S BEST, BECAUSE WE'RE THE GOVERNMENT!! :banghead:

If it's a "Cyber-security" Issue they need to unplug their servers and stfu. Not block the US from the vast information/news the internet provides.

Oh boy, I guess the sky is still falling, huh?

Of course, the US government has ALWAYS had the ability and the power to shut down the internet. Why do you think the U.N.(bless their shriveled, soot-stained souls)has been trying to get the US to hand over control to them? (We all know deep down that the U.N. knows best, right?)

Who actually "owns" the internet?
Not the individual servers, but the piece that connects the servers?

The internet was created by DARPA to help us survive a nuclear attack.

Al gore!!! He invented it.

Boatwrench said:

Who actually "owns" the internet?
Not the individual servers, but the piece that connects the servers?

Click to expand...

The "controller, or "gatekeeper" is ICANN

http://www.icann.org/

Which is a totally independent, wholly-not-US-owned, non-profit company, that just happens to have been set up by the Federal government. You know, like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Except it's really independent. Really! There is absolutely NO WAY that the feds could go in and just tell them to pull the plug,and there never has been.

/sarcasm off.

Boatwrench said:

Who actually "owns" the internet?
Not the individual servers, but the piece that connects the servers?

Click to expand...

The internet is a collection of independent networks that exchange traffic with each other by mutual consent. Some very small parts of it are government regulated. It would be impossible for the government to shut it down *quickly* without ordering the independent network operators to terminate service immediately.

If ICANN was shut down u could still use it you would just have to have the IP of the websites server no?

You can use the web without ICANN support, and there are internet networks that operate completely independently of ICANN. The problem would be if ICANN shut down all of their servers, a HUGE chunk of the "world wide" wouldn't be easily accessible on the web.

ICANN is typically thought of in the context of domain names but there is a lot more to the internet than that. For example, address blocks and their routing identifiers are assigned to regions and then reallocated to organizations within those regions (ARIN serves the Americas region), and if they go away the domain name stuff won't matter. Can the government clear the routing and domain name databases? Not directly, but they can make ICANN and ARIN purge, but even then they would still have to tell the network operators to shutdown or else copies of the last-known databases will be kept and reused. The internet was designed for fault tolerance, in general it sees censorship as failure and routes around it.

I'll bet with a few strategically placed nodes, it would be possible to shut down the inter-nets. I imagine that DARPA has intimate knowladge of where these nodes would be placed. Heck even China can limit access in their country.

china runs all of their external traffic through government routers so they can shutdown external access at whim. the US has private network carriers who provide connectivity to other countries. the govt would have to provide a court order demanding that all traffic cease immediately

ehall said:

The internet is a collection of independent networks that exchange traffic with each other by mutual consent. Some very small parts of it are government regulated. It would be impossible for the government to shut it down *quickly* without ordering the independent network operators to terminate service immediately.

Click to expand...

Based on what you are saying there should be no fear of this government agency? The US would not be able to stop the flow of info.

I didn't say that, I said that if they wanted to knock it offline immediately they would need the ability to order the independent networks to comply. Maybe the bill provides that, I don't know. I'm just pointing out that they do not run the networks, and the interconnects between those networks are not under their control, even though they regulate some of the databases.

ehall said:

I didn't say that, I said that if they wanted to knock it offline immediately they would need the ability to order the independent networks to comply. Maybe the bill provides that, I don't know. I'm just pointing out that they do not run the networks, and the interconnects between those networks are not under their control, even though they regulate some of the databases.

Click to expand...

I have been an ICANN member for about 12 years now, shutting down the net is not as hard as you might think. The fed actually do have the ability to shut the trans Atlantic and pacific lines down as well as the sats. And yes there are plans for that.
The feds though have been building a secondary basically another DARPA net to get the military and govt stuff off the civilian networks.
Would they do it, the ramifications would be tremendous from the stock markets to the banks so if they did the reasons would have to be pretty important. I also imagine that cisco has a back door to every core router in the world, you know programmers, sometimes they need a quick way in and bypass procedure and chain of command.
Same with China, now with Intel having their big R&D facility in China I would be very surprised if they were not also adding it into processors chips when they can get away with it.
Yes, I'm paranoid but I'm paranoid by training, there is a difference.

RichP said:

I have been an ICANN member for about 12 years now, shutting down the net is not as hard as you might think. The fed actually do have the ability to shut the trans Atlantic and pacific lines down as well as the sats. And yes there are plans for that.
The feds though have been building a secondary basically another DARPA net to get the military and govt stuff off the civilian networks.
Would they do it, the ramifications would be tremendous from the stock markets to the banks so if they did the reasons would have to be pretty important. I also imagine that cisco has a back door to every core router in the world, you know programmers, sometimes they need a quick way in and bypass procedure and chain of command.
Same with China, now with Intel having their big R&D facility in China I would be very surprised if they were not also adding it into processors chips when they can get away with it.
Yes, I'm paranoid but I'm paranoid by training, there is a difference.

Click to expand...

There's no real way to do that... even if we could put such information in the microcode or silicon, the government (or us, or whatever) would have to get access to the system before that would do us any good. Also, if such a feature existed I'd be the guy required to make sure it worked - I do platform/architecture validation for Intel. Such a feature does not exist.

Note: this is all my personal opinion legally speaking, I do not officially represent Intel and have never and will never claim to - I gotta say this line or I could get in trouble. Amen.

As for the government shutting down the internet - listen to ehall, he's got a good explanation up there about how various private network providers who collectively comprise "the internet" work together and interconnect. If you want more info, look up BGP, AS numbers, basic routing tutorials, perhaps MPLS, etc etc. It is possible for the internet to be shut down but it would require court orders, or the usage of the disconnects RichP mentioned (I think) on the cross-atlantic fiber lines. However, in the past, things like this have happened ACCIDENTALLY and been caused by very small ISPs - if you want a good example look for records/explanations of "the as 7007 incident" and/or a technical explanation of how Pakistan accidentally hijacked Youtube's entire IP allocation. Another good example of a way the Internet can be badly destabilized entirely accidentally can be found in the way the Net responded to a bug in MikroTik routers combined with an honest accidental misconfiguration AND a patched bug in Cisco routers when AS47868 (SuproNet) accidentally prepended their ASN to the AS-path they were advertising 252 times on February 16th of this year.

If ICANN/the DNS infrastructure was shut down, the net would be inoperable as far as most people are concerned - you would still be able to communicate but domain names not present in your computer's DNS cache, your router's DNS cache, your ISP's DNS cache, etc would cease to function properly. You could get to sites via IP directly unless they are hosted using virtual-hosts (the HTTP sort, not the virtualized private server sort) because those would always display the default main site rather than the site specified by the domain in the Host: HTTP header line.

</technobabble>

EDIT: references for accidental net outages
http://www.renesys.com/blog/2009/02/the-flap-heard-around-the-worl.shtml SuproNet, early this year
http://www.circleid.com/posts/82258_pakistan_hijacks_youtube_closer_look/ Pakistan accidentally hijacks YouTube, early last year
http://merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/1997-04/msg00380.html the "AS7007 Incident", 12 years ago
http://www.renesys.com/blog/2006/01/coned_steals_the_net.shtml apparently Con-Ed did the same thing a while ago too... looking familiar yet?
http://www.renesys.com/blog/2005/12/internetwide_nearcatastrophela.shtml how about TTnet doing the same thing?