oh my eyes.

please use text breaks. please.

DaveBax... you're mixing metaphors but I understand you have a trust/belief issue... and that's fine. You shouldn't trust or believe. You should research and think for yourself and take interest in what the people you have faith in say...also with a grain of doubt.

Scoutdog, What I believe is that an Infra, Intranet or securenet should be developed for those emergencies. Not a sledgehammer like others wrote of, but rather a smooth engagement of one while the other is sealed off from attack.

The most deadly cyber attacks will have built in dormancy periods to give time for it to spread everywhere before anyone even knows it exists. So that makes your on off switch look pretty useless!

Personally i think the most successful attack will result when someone succeeds (should i say succeeds 'again'?) in using the secret back door spy programs Microsoft already has built into everyone's Operating systems.... and you just know Microsoft cannot resist having it, just like the ocean tide cannot resist coming in and going out.

Here is a good idea for the on off switch idea tho.... Have a special feature in modems and or network cards that monitors data flow and if unusual activity is detected, it can automatically deactivate the connection. The monitoring program will be stand alone, not connected to the data stream or the primary system. so that no outsider fancy pants can dance a clever prance and manipulate the monitoring program - This would even stop 'Skynet' type penetration!! But probably would not stop dormancy style attack as i mentioned in first paragraph above.

I know I mixed a couple things, sorry about that.

As far as think for yourself and do research I have a personal feeling on this. I went through research and more research starting in 2005 and put to much on the faith part which didn't work out when actually the research said something different as research I was checking had already been proven. I'm working on seperating things and best if I stay away from this type of thread as I still tend to get personal but don't mean any harm. So best I just sit back and read the post as some of it is interresting with the different views.

Read the scenario again. Part of it was that the botnet thing was known as well.

Not disagreeing with that idea... interesting.

@Dave... as you wish, my friend... smiles to you.

I was speaking in general, not specific to the scinario.

But another good scinario is the cyber attack in Terminator 3! Not withstanding the cardinal insult that a computer in a vehicle can control the vehicles with no servo devices connected to the primary controls!! Ouch!!! And the producer decided that fact would not be noticed by fans???

Hollywood liberties. Happens all the time.

There are two kinds of bloopers that show up in movies -

1) ones that are passive, most people wouldn't even notice them and if the did, it would be of momentary interest and then forgotten.

2) Ones that are aggressive, they leap out of the movie and give you a massive slap on the face and it just destroys the whole movie.

That terminator3 blooper not only slapped me in the face, but it knocked me right out of my chair!!! I think it would have been better if the director of terminator3 edited all that out and replaced it with a film of him taking a shit on our heads, honestly, because that is basically what he did to our intelligence!

Simply put, NO!

Oh, yeah, some kids like to knock down web sites here and there. So what? Such 'attacks' on govt web sites happen all the time and present no real threat to anything. Moreover, intent of such 'attack' is to either raise attention (like anons do) or make information unaccessible. By disabling national internet, you are just doing what attackers are trying to - you disable ALL these sites yourself.

As for espionage, in most cases it is done via malware, and disabling internet will be no help these, as target computers are not connected to internet anyway, and malware is designed to spread via flash drives and other means.

I did waste some hours reading that report, but still do not see how it justifies Internet lockdown. Text mostly is too vague to properly understand what kind of threats they are talking about, and I'm suspecting its primary intent is to give false impression of China's IW offencive capabilities to report readers.

I'm not saying IW does not exist. But its nature is far from what journalists and such Krekel's are drawing to the public. There are no 'attack dates', there is long-term, routine work, which can be countered only by according enforced security policies.

Just say NO to

S:3480 bill

a simple NO. If you want to turn off the net in your house, turn the modem off at the power switch. We don't need the government dictating when or where we have access to it. Common sense should prevail here.

The public already is.  But the question and concern was to protect the government.  The attack did not seek to kill the consumer, so why shut them down?  We already have botnets out the wazoo (and killing them is always good).

Yes, like Abrams' version of the Enterprise having a brewery in its guts and long stretches of clear pipe big enough for Scotty to swim in. Gah.

Back on topic, I take the public fearmongering about IT warfare with shovels of salt. Lieberman's latest whinging point reads to me like little more than an attempt to sound as if he understands the modern world, which I seriously doubt. What I also seriously doubt is the mere possibility of any functional 'kill switch.'

The Internet was developed by DARPA (yes, more essential technology created by the public sector). The original goal to build a network that was flexible enough to handle losing many major nodes and still keep traffic moving. Mix that in with what's happened since the .com swamp began growing and the only plausible sorts of lockouts are the kind of serious government and sensitive-industry firewalls/security protocols. Unless someone seriously expects a nationwide 'kill switch' to include a way of taking down every comm sat that we don't control directly.

I'd rather see our dwindling federal resources go to the existing units in the DoD that already know more about what happened to the centrifuges in Iran than we probably want to know, and are hopefully getting faster and better at their work all the time.

I agree with this.  'Fearing the people' just means the government feels much more need to pay attention to the needs of the electorate.  The government doesn't have a four or six year cycle to do as they wish, (and to prepare and program - via the media - the 'party base' for the next cycle.  In a parliamentary system, the government can be brought down at almost any time if it alienates too many people smaller parties in the coalition).

We need to ditch the electoral college.  No more presidents elected to the office while their opponent garners a larger number of the votes cast.  At one time US senators were elected by their respective state legislatures.  Direct election of senators was / is a change from the original constitution - an amendment was required.  We could do the same with the process to elect the chief executive (US President).  Lots of luck, though.  If the ERA couldn't get enough states to place it as part of the US Constitution, then direct election of the US president / vice president is also unlikely.

Much better, but even much less likely, would be the US adopting the parliamentary system that most other developed democracies use.   Third parties get a much better chance of having some influence.  I won't hold my breath.

I'm somewhat divided on that. I've got a lot of issues with the military and their policies, and think that they are already far, far overpowered and "overweaponed". So I don't really want them to get a decent offensive cyberwarfare program for fear that it would be abused or made to backfire. But there are also a lot of other scary people out there, and I have no ill will towards my fellow American-located civvies.