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Can you imagine Mother Jones publishing an article titled "Should Bush Control the Internet?" ? Why is this even a question? Two things: 1) Good luck trying t
by ajju 18y ago
Can you imagine Mother Jones publishing an article titled "Should Bush Control the Internet?" ? Why is this even a question?
Two things:
1) Good luck trying to "shut the Internet down" after declaring an "Internet emergency".
2) Any sufficiently motivated law enforcement agent can probably already read your mail.
- pragmatic 18y ago1) The Feds would require Telecoms to implement systems to shutdown portions of "Teh Nets". You don't need to shut down web/email/etc servers you just need to update the config files in a few backbone devices (routers/etc). You could shut the internet traffic down in my state fairly easily. Most cities are served by a very few providers and all those providers rely on the underlying carries (ATT/Qwest/etc) to get data moved interstate.
- jrockway 18y agoThe first time the Internet is shut down, you can bet that two things will happen: 1) Big companies will complain very loudly, and probably cost the government and ISPs a lot of money defending lawsuits. (Can you imagine what would happen to Amazon if it were shut down for a day? Not something that's good for their bottom line...) 2) The damage will be routed around. Right now, we trust ISPs because they are convenient. But IP over amateur radio is certainly possible, as are mesh networks and other things like that. Remember, the entire point of the Internet is to route around damage.
- asciilifeform 18y agoI think the kill switch is intended for a martial law scenario, where lawsuits and the like will be irrelevant.
- jrockway 18y agoI assume people will still know how to build their own radios, however.
- ryanwaggoner 18y agoHaha...this really made me laugh. Honestly, if there were no web access, how many people in the US could build their own radio?
- asciilifeform 18y agoThe time to build (a wireless-mesh replacement for the Internet, sets of encrypted radios, or for that matter, any subversive technology) is now, rather than when martial law is declared - and we are shipped off to the camps before our soldering irons can warm up. How many people even own dead-tree versions of essential engineering references? Most people have abandoned even dictionaries in favor of the web. We have grown utterly dependent on a rather surprisingly fragile medium with plenty of government tentacles wriggling in assorted orifices.
- Tangurena 18y agoThe point of this proposed bill is to retroactively legalize the unlawful wiretapping that had been going on. It legalizes the things we know about, as well as the things that the media hasn't told us about yet. And I phrase it that way because they knew about the NSA taps and hushed them up for more than a year.
- jhancock 18y agoThat may be part of the point. I'm not privy to what the insiders on "on the hill" are thinking. Another possibility is that folks in D.C. are scared that something worse than 9/11 is in the horizon. What could be worse?...global economic collapse. Is it real, is it FUD? Hard to say. But the "PIC" (people in charge) seem to be hedging their bets. My apologies for sounding like a post from some other forum. Fear does seem to be a primary motivator these days.