Court: Homeland Security Must Disclose 'Internet Kill Switch' 228
An anonymous reader writes "The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) must disclose its plans for a so-called Internet 'kill switch,' a federal court ruled on Tuesday. The United States District Court for the District of Columbia rejected the agency's arguments that its protocols surrounding an Internet kill switch were exempt from public disclosure and ordered the agency to release the records in 30 days. However, the court left the door open for the agency to appeal the ruling."
Re:DHS Kill Switch? (Score:5, Interesting)
Media blackout. A populace ignorant of goings on is easier to control.
"And how DHS is the appropriate department for its implementation?"
Fact is there should be zero reason for an internet kill switch in the first place. There should be zero critical systems internet facing, which makes the argument to protect against terrorist attack to our infrastructure and critical systems moot. Which leads me to believe the only reason for one is to control the population, or rather control the data the population has access to, read media black out.
DHS nor any department should have need for it's implementation, nor should any department control it should one actually exist.
This right here is the best reason I can come up with to remove US control over any portion of the net, this includes hosting and services located in the US.
And yes I am an ashamed American, ashamed of what my country has become.
DHS SUCK IT BITCHES!
Re:Let's talk about the more interesting thing her (Score:4, Interesting)
There's plenty of DNS servers (both root servers, gTLD servers, and ccTLD servers) located outside of US jurisdiction.
While an unexpected shutdown could certainly cause some disruption both inside and outside the US, I'm not sure how effective a global DNS shutdown would be -- there's been significant fractions of the root DNS infrastructure that's been taken offline due to attacks in the past and the system continued to work without interruption. Even if there was a disruption, it's likely that non-US operators of root/gTLD/ccTLD servers would setup workarounds fairly quickly and the rest of the world would go about its business.
Anyway, it's something the government could ever do *once*. The instant they do it, the world changes and would highly unlikely to depend on a system managed by a single country.
Shutting down something like Google, for example, would likely be far more disruptive.
Re:I doubt it (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure how they'd do it physically. If we look at the internet for what it actually is by definition - a network is a bunch of computers connected to other computes, the internet is a bunch of networks connected to other networks - the internet is actually privately owned, even at the peering level of tier 1 ISP's.
I suppose you could bring it down by having the national guard (or whoever) commandeer a major NOC (network operations center) of a tier 1 ISP and then fudge the BGP tables of all of their major peering points worldwide (or nationwide if you prefer,) but the links wouldn't be physically broken. Other ISP's could compensate by just ignoring those peers. The customers of that ISP and its client ISPs would be down for sure, but not everybody.
I'm still trying to figure out why we even have a need for a kill switch. A terror attack on SCADA systems? Just require SCADA systems have a communications kill switch, then you don't need an internet kill switch.