Should president flip switch on websites during crisis?

[Marla Coffey]

With such a diverse group of members here, this should be a good topic for discussion:

What's government's role in making the Web secure?

By LOLITA C. BALDOR
The Associated Press
Sunday, September 27, 2009; 12:00 AM

WASHINGTON -- There is no kill switch for the Internet, no secret on-off button in an Oval Office drawer.

Yet when a Senate committee was exploring ways to secure computer networks, a provision to give the president the power to shut down Internet traffic to compromised Web sites in an emergency set off alarms.
Read the rest of the story

[Denise M. Carter]

I know my history - surely this is not possible, the whole 'distributed systems' plan was that it couldn't be shut down! Am I right? Do they mean shutting off servers or websites?

Although...

It wouldn't surprise me if there was a whole separate system with a totally different packet switching protocol that no-one knew about...

[Marla Coffey]

The article sounds like it would affect websites instead of the whole net, which could make sense because a website that has been targeted could send out thousands upon thousands of infected emails and cause a major meltdown. However, we've had significant attacks on websites before and it didn't require the government to step in and take control.

And I doubt that anyone could shut down the entire internet due to the distributed systems that you mentioned. The US wouldn't be able to shut down servers in other countries, and even if servers were shut down it would only affect the US.

One of my concerns is that giving anyone this power could be dangerous. Since we get all our news and information from the net now, shutting down websites would be like other governments shutting down newspapers and taking control of the airwaves.

Marla

[Marla Coffey]

Your time was certainly well spent, wasn't it?

You are right, I should have been more careful... I guess all English teachers should know better than to *ever* say that we all do anything. It's a sure way to tell that a True/False question is false, and a sure way to tell that Marla is over-generalizing. :)

That being said, I wonder if anyone has ever studied how much of our broadcast news originates with something that was initially found online. And I hadn't thought of the powers that are already there for use in emergencies, so I'm glad you jumped in here. That's one of the reasons I love TCFIR--there's such a diverse group of people here that everybody can add something from their own experience to further the discussion and make it richer.

And I don't consider myself an alarmist, but looking at some of my recent posts one might think that I've got a bunker in the basement waiting for the revolution (I don't, by the way...but I can't reveal its "undisclosed location" or security will be compromised, lol).

Marla

[Robert E. Watson]

I wonder what a "compromised" website might be. I rather imagine that it would take the federal government some weeks to find such ... and that the owner would have turned it off long before.

Really, if the concern is about "government" websites being attacked there's a no-brainer response ... take them off the public net for a while and leave them on a parallel government net if the government actually has an internal use for them.

[Marla Coffey]

Bob, I think it's about any websites, which is understandable when you start thinking about the financial catastrophe that this could cause. Imagine EVERYONE'S bank accounts or credit cards getting frozen in a full scale attack. Or all our identities stolen.

As I think more about this topic, I realize that my real question is why am I getting so dependent on the Internet that if it stopped functioning, my world would collapse. I think I'd rather live my life in a way that I can use the benefits of the internet without being completely dependent on it. But will I do this? Time will tell. It's awfully easy to get addicted to convenience and an endless supply of information.

Warm regards,

Marla

[Robert E. Watson]

Yes, that's an enormous problem. It's a scaling issue (the "big institutions" can influence the public so that all institutions follow their lead) and also a technology issue (our Internet design favors creativity and openess over security).

The banks, I think, can harden themselves (at some cost, with the initial adopters spending money that later adopters would not need to spend) and their transaction processes, but getting the public to harden their browsers/computers is an uphill battle.

Ease of use means mountains of code means the occasional bad code that can be exploited.