INTERNET KILL SWITCH

The complete Internet shutdown this week in Libya involved a new way to turn off web access for an entire country. Earlier this year, the total Internet blockade in Egypt backfired and emboldened the protesters. China is well known for blocking Internet services, but it’s not just China. Of course, having the government turn off the Internet could never happen in the United States. We couldn’t condemn the action in other countries while at the same time plan it here. No one would even suggest such a thing, right?

Wrong. The topic came up last June when Senators Joseph Lieberman, Susan Collins and Thomas Carper introduced the controversial “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010″. [PDF] One vague provision in the bill gave the president the power to “authorize emergency measures to protect the nation’s most critical infrastructure if a cyber vulnerability is being exploited or is about to be exploited.” It became known as the Internet “kill switch” bill even though the words ‘kill’ and ‘switch’ are not found in the bill. In fact, one report claims, in the event of a cyberwar, an Internet shutdown would cause more problems that it would prevent.

Joe Lieberman generously suggested the president is “not going to do it every day” (phew), but he did argue “we need the capacity for the president to say, Internet service provider, we’ve got to disconnect the American Internet from all traffic coming in from another foreign country, or we’ve got to put a patch on this part of it.” This sounds a lot like what might have been said inside Mubarak’s presidential palace.

It seems that with every passing day our very own government is behaving more and more like the Third World tyrant dictator while telling we the American people that they are “looking out for our best interest.” How can Egypt’s Mubarak, China’s Jintao or Libya’s Gaddafi action to use the Internet “Kill Switch” evil and anti civil rights, but the American’s president can use it and it is supposed to be “protecting our people?” The evil and blatant corruption is mind boggling to the normal mind. I say evil is evil, no matter what country it is in nor what government propagates it.

Dr Tim McClure