What really needs to be done is ask Al Gore what he thinks of a kill switch, after all, he invented the internet.

There is that.

Only...ONLY because it was you that asked, Mike:

 

Understood.  However, the switch would be in the hands of the president, so it would be his switch (Lieberman's bill).

Controlling mass communications is a typical war strategy.  Somebody's going to do it.  I suppose the question isn't so much "Do you want somebody to do it?" as it is "Who do you want to do it?"  Answer becomes "My side", whichever side "My side" happens to be.

That's an assumption. Perhaps the ultimate responsibility would be his, but Operations probably in the NSA would have actual "immediate" control.

 

Not necessarily. It may be given to the pres. in the text of the bill, but the linked article merely states that it would be in the hands of "the U.S. Government". That could mean anybody, including the Pentagon or (heaven forbid!) the Department of Agriculture.

The problem is that this would not simply "control" mass communications as destroy them. It worries me a great deal to see the phrase "civilian access" to the internet in the article as well- it seems to me (as I've said before) that from a tactical perspective, you would want to cut off the areas most vulnerable to, and likely to be the target of, a cyberattack- utility companies, first responders, and the military. Not civilians. If the United States is doing such a shoddy job of serving its citizens that they think propaganda blitzes by China would have a reasonable chance of working, then they have bigger problems than the internet. (Not saying that they are... remember, I'm still trying to look at this from inside Liebermann-land).

If you do your research it was obvious that the government simply pressured the service providers via phone calls until each had shutdown their portion. It didn't all go down at once, but had a few minutes delay between each one. In other words, SkyNet will still win, you are all doomed, make your time ha ha ha, ha ha ha.

Yep, just like bombing television and radio stations.

 

Or anyone that you elect to office as well.

It would seem to me that such a "kill switch" would already exist somewhere since we're talking wiring and connecting....two things that can be un-wired or disconnected...they just don't want us to know about it. As far as our military...if these idiots don't already have something in place to protect our secrets then it's probably already game over...and they just don't want us to know about it.

And I could be wrong...but didn't our current internet belong to the military at one time...and they just passed it on to us for a better model? I remember reading that somewhere some time ago.

...

In fact, in the case of the US, it will be very easy... DNS server are located in US... shutdown the DNS server and browser will not be able to translate a URL address in a IP address...

US gov is already working on a similar tool for stop piracy :

http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/09/28/worldwide_authority_for_american_copyright_cops

The main mechanism of the bill is to interfere with the Internet's domain name system (DNS), which translates names like "www.eff.org" or "www.nytimes.com" into the IP addresses that computers use to communicate.

A other article : http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/09/29/engineers-slam-internet-censorship-ahead-key-vote/

If something like this is created, it will not be very difficult to shutdown any site in the US... in fact, it can work world wide since US DNS server are the master server... unless that you begin to memorize IP... by example, addresses 192.0.32.10 IPV4 or 2620:0:2d0:200::10 IPV6 in place of www.example.com !!!

Seem that large scale internet censorship is something who can be made easily in US...

Soon of later, they will have the authority... at the time being, there is some scary bills proposed by political that almost nobody know about...

 

 

That's it, the thread is complete.