> "Forget the technical hurdle, what about the constitutional one?" We haven't had much luck with that one lately. I don't think the "Why" is quite so transpa

> "Forget the technical hurdle, what about the constitutional one?" We haven't had much luck with that one lately. I don't think the "Why" is quite so transparently dystopian. They don't want to turn off the entire internet. It's just another attempted end-run around the judicial process, to make it easier to further political and economic goals. e.g. filtering WikiLeaks or BitTorrent. The idea that they would need this to disconnect critical infrastructure to protect it from cyberattack is laughable. Any critical infrastructure that could still operate independent from the internet should not have a connection to the internet, and if it did should certainly have it's own disconnect capability. The only reason to put disconnect capability on the ISP or backbone carrier is to do it against the will of the target facility. If they wanted to protect things like the Hoover Dam [1] they'd just issue/enforce some government regs. [2] [1] The Dam Authority has already taken issue with being a talking point in this debate. Pointing out that, no, they are not foolish enough to have dam controls connected to the internet. [2] I'm pretty sure these already exist, as regards air-gaps for critical infrastructure and security requirements for networks that do have a connection to the public internet. There may not be a unified national service to flip connection-kill-switches, but that would be resolved with a government network project, not a new law. The government already has legal authority over infrastructure.