Wired News reports on another bill proposing to create government authority to take over the Internet—this time, because of “cyberattacks.”
Most revealing is the part of the report exposing how Senate staff must fish around for reasons why the authority would be exercised, never mind to what effect:
In order for the President to declare such an emergency, there would have to be knowledge both of a massive network flaw — and information that someone was about to leverage that hole to do massive harm. For example, the recent “Aurora” hack to steal source code from Google, Adobe and other companies wouldn’t have qualified, one Senate staffer noted: “It’d have to be Aurora 2, plus the intel that country X is going to take us down using that vulnerability.”
A second staffer suggested that evidence of hackers looking to leverage something like the massive Conficker worm — which infected millions of machines and was seemingly poised in April 2009 to unleash something nefarious — might trigger the bill’s emergency provisions. “You could argue there’s some threat information built in there,” the staffer said.
These scenarios will never happen. And we wouldn’t want the government grabbing control of the Internet if they did.
The idea of government “taking over” the Internet for security purposes is equal parts misconceived and self-defeating. It’s a packet-switched network, meaning that it routes around the equivalent of damage that would be caused by anyone’s attempt to “control” it. The government could certainly degrade the Internet with a well-coordinated attack, of course.
And that’s the way to think about government controlling the Internet in some kind of emergency: It would be an attack on the country’s natural resilience.
In February, CNN broadcast a bogus reality TV show produced by the Bipartisan Policy Center called “cyber.shockwave.” A variety of technically incompetent government officials talked about pulling the plug on the Internet and cell phone networks in response to some emergency. Commentator D33PT00T captured the idiocy of this idea, Tweeting, “ok my phn doesn’t work & Internet doesn’t work – ths guys R planning 2 run arnd w/ bullhorns ‘all is well remain calm!’”
The Internet may have points of weakness, but it is a source of strength overall. A government take-over of the Internet in the event of emergency would be equivalent to an auto-immune reaction in which the government would attack the society. Proposals for the federal government to take control of the Internet under any circumstance are unfounded and dangerous.