Let's imagine there's really a national security risk that actually requires the President to order the internet turned off. I don't know what it would be, but let's say it's dire. In that case, the president (for all practical purposes) has the power to send the national guard into all the relevant physical locations and cut the power to the internet backbones. It's illegal and wrong, in the same sense that Abraham Lincoln's multiple violations of the Constitution were illegal and wrong. Which is to say, it's one of those edge cases that the law, by design has to leave out, a situation where you have to violate the Constitution in order to save it, but there is no way in hell you're going to give any freedom within the law itself to do anything of the kind. This is a very difficult idea for a lot of people to wrap their heads around.
I was just talking about Lincoln with a friend. If you're bored sometime, look at one of Lincoln's speeches and replace "union" with "empire" - it still works! "Our most sacred American empire must not be divided... these rebels may not be allowed to break the spirit of the empire..."
And for the record, I like Lincoln - but he's easily, easily the most imperial-minded president in U.S. history. It's a shame we don't call it for what it is - the Confederate secession was by-the-books legal, the south became a separate sovereign country, and the north went and conquered them. And yet, I think it was the right call.
Every American should read Lincoln's first inauguration address. Basically everything school teaches about Lincoln is wrong. Here's his own words:
"There is much controversy about the delivering up of fugitives from service or labor. The clause I now read is as plainly written in the Constitution as any other of its provisions:
No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall in consequence of any law or regulation therein be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.
It is scarcely questioned that this provision was intended by those who made it for the reclaiming of what we call fugitive slaves; and the intention of the lawgiver is the law. All members of Congress swear their support to the whole Constitution—to this provision as much as to any other. To the proposition, then, that slaves whose cases come within the terms of this clause "shall be delivered up" their oaths are unanimous. Now, if they would make the effort in good temper, could they not with nearly equal unanimity frame and pass a law by means of which to keep good that unanimous oath?
There is some difference of opinion whether this clause should be enforced by national or by State authority, but surely that difference is not a very material one. If the slave is to be surrendered, it can be of but little consequence to him or to others by which authority it is done. And should anyone in any case be content that his oath shall go unkept on a merely unsubstantial controversy as to how it shall be kept?"
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Here's Lincoln's part about the union being preserved, his argument is that the American union is older than the Constitution and comes before it (a crazy argument never used before or since):
"Descending from these general principles, we find the proposition that in legal contemplation the Union is perpetual confirmed by the history of the Union itself. The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured, and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was "to form a more perfect Union."
But if destruction of the Union by one or by a part only of the States be lawfully possible, the Union is less perfect than before the Constitution, having lost the vital element of perpetuity."
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And here's my swapping out of "empire" for "Union" -
"But if destruction of the Empire by one or by a part only of the States be lawfully possible, the Empire is less perfect than before the Constitution, having lost the vital element of perpetuity." - It still works.
And mind you, I like Lincoln. He made the right call. But saying the Civil War was about slavery is like saying World War II was about coal. I mean, it kind of sort of was in a very tortured way, but that's a very incomplete understanding. Lincoln was very pro-slavery in his first inauguration address, and threated the South with war to preserve the empire if they tried to leave. They thought he was bluffing. He wasn't. Every American should read that first inauguration address, it's Lincoln's own words. Your view of the American Civil War will never be the same afterwards.
I'd say the Civil War was about slavery the same way WWII was about fascism--the casus belli wasn't that one side held slaves or that one side was fascist, but having fascists control a couple of central European countries leads to war the same way having a pseudo-aristocratic slave-owning social structure in the same country as a free-labor capitalist society leads to inevitable divisions and attempted secession.
The South was a deeply evil society even then--plantation owners were hereditary lords in all but name, except their slaves were mere chattel rather than serfs, and everyone in the middle were exactly that.
Partially yes, but 1860 was the most divisive Presidential election in history. The Republican strategy was basically to punt on the South and run on an entirely pro-Northern/Western platform. Notably, the Republicans ran on a platform putting tariffs on foreign machinery, requiring raw materials to be processed in America before being shipped, granting free farmland in the federally owned West (instead of selling it), and support for a Northeast/Western railroad. All of those were unpalatable to the South. The tariffs protected Northern industry at the expense of making it more expensive for Southerns. Not letting raw cotton be shipped overseas until it was sent to the North for processing was going to be a nightmare.
The free land would again reduce the price of inputs to Northern factories by producing more agriculture, at the expense of the South. Mind you, the South had also been a part of paying for and fighting for Western lands in the various purchases and wars, and now the land they'd bought/fought for was going to be given away, which would also lower the prices of their crops.
And so on, and so on. Lincoln carried zero southern states, zero border states. He took all of the Northeast and West Coast.
I agree with you on the deeply evil society thing, 100% agreement. Just that's not why the war started. Or, it's one small component of it. Slavery was ended without a massive violent conflict in most civilized places and could have been ended that way in the USA, and besides, the Civil War was only partially about slavery. Lincoln's entire platform was anti-South, he ran his campaign similar to Bush II: That is, punt entirely on large parts of the country and try to win core demographics. The tariffs, shipping laws, giving federally owned lands for free, and railroads were all pro-Northern measures and somewhat hostile to the South. Lincoln didn't even want to end slavery, as you'll see in his inauguration speech. The way they teach the Civil War in American high school, as sort of a moral fight, is entirely wrong - it was about politics, money, and empire. But anyways, I'm on the North's side for the Civil War, glad they did it, and glad they won. But we should all understand the real root causes of it. It wasn't fought for morality's sake.
Tariffs in particular were an issue between North and South forever, most notably in the nullification crisis, where South Carolina "nullies" petitioned their states to "nullify" the 1828 "Tariff of Abominations". The legal theory at the time was that the states had the power to nullify federal law, so if you were in California and California legalized medicinal marijuana (hey!) the federal government had no legal power to enforce drug laws[1]. Andrew Jackson and the U.S. Army put a quick end to that idea. (This confrontation also put to an end the service of South Carolinian Vice President John C. Calhoun, who resigned and ran for Senate, not at all helped by his wife making wild accusations about the Secretary of War and his wife.)
Lincoln's election (when he wasn't even on the ballot in half the states) was the casus belli, in the sense that some Serbian bomb-throwing anarchist killing some archduke was the casus belli of the First World War. But that's like dousing your neighbor's house in kerosene and lighter fluid and then saying it was burned down by a single match.
Incidentally, you're right on the morality thing. A few enlightened liberals were abolitionists, but most anti-Southerners just thought the whole slavery-backed aristocracy thing going on in the South was bad news, and that the "Slave Power" would take over the country and crush democracy. Actually, that was the more consistent argument--the North fulfilled its demand for cheap labor by importing tons of poor European immigrants who worked in factories and lived in tenements, which was in many respects a worse life than slavery. It's hard to take a moral high ground from there.
[1] The legalization laws for medicinal marijuana simply create an exemption for state laws. Since state and local cops don't usually enforce federal law, this has the practical effect of sanctioning medicinal marijuana, even though on a legal basis the DEA could go in and sweep every single dispensary and cancer patient they find. At various points in recent years, the feds actually have gone after medicinal marijuana even in legalized states, leading to significant controversy. So if you can imagine Dick Cheney as a hardcore stoner and Dick Cheney's wife spreading wild rumors about Don Rumsfeld, you have a fairly decent grasp on Jacksonian-era political intrigue.
Good comment, I think we're basically on the same page. I generally like Andrew Jackson, he was right about the banks and he balanced the budget, only U.S. President born poor, etc, but how he handled nullification was wrong in my book. Interesting that it's coming up again now with the medical marijuana thing... of course, not many people are sympathetic to the drug laws right now. I wonder what would happen if Texas declared income tax invalid in TX? Well, it'd be interesting at least...
I think we're on similar pages, probably a couple differences in interpretation but both aware that the official historybook version is lacking. Good discussion, cheers.
If you're bored sometime, look at one of Lincoln's speeches and replace "union" with "empire" - it still works!
I agree with your outlook on what Lincoln did.
However the implied "logic" in this sentence I disagree with. Of course it still works if you substitute one noun for another! That's how parts of speech work! This is especially true if you use a substitute noun which has semantics close to the original. (Empire and Union both indicate a national/supra-national polity.) In other words, this isn't any more significant than the observation that you could take many texts containing "Terrier" and substitute the word with "Pekinese."
Not sure if anyone still following this, but the point isn't that the grammar/syntax works, it's that the meaning and spirit of the phrases is retained when swapping "union" for "empire". Swapping in similar-but-different nouns "democracy" or "monarchy" changes the meaning of the phrase and it wouldn't work. Monarchy is obvious. But note that democracy wouldn't work either - because most likely the 1790's understanding of the Constitution was that States could leave the USA by democratic vote, and the Confederacy did precisely that.
So I didn't mean that the syntax/language works - like you said, of course it does. I meant the general spirit and integrity of the phrase and speech aren't changed in the least when swapping union for empire, in a way that swapping in "democracy" or "monarchy" or other similar-but-different noun would not. When Lincoln said "union", he meant "empire" - and again, good on him, I think, the world is a much better place because he kept the American... union... intact.
Indeed. And it's doubtful he'd have to use troops and cut power lines; if it really was a observable national emergency, his request would be enough. People grant amazing deference to putative leaders in uncertain/dangerous times, and the people in private organizations who run various systems aren't antigovernment ideologues, idiots, or malicious foreign agents. It's only requests that are wildly unreasonable, open-ended, or based-on-secret-evidence that they'd resist. So there's no need to formalize this sort of Presidential power.
Any kill switch capability that is built in will simply become another vector for attack—in this case an attack that overrides the core competency of the Internet which is massive redundancy in case any one section fails.
It is almost a certainty that such a capability will be exploited.
how about a guy at the border unplugging the fiber optic cable? I assume it can already be disconnected somewhere physically; all this does is authorize the government to do it.
and if there's an invading, the US military will probably be operating on private property without permission too. But I think its quite clear that's ok in such a situation.
Is it any surprise that he's the primary sponsor? You can always count on Joe to be on the wrong side of history.
An Internet kill switch is one of the worst and most authoritarian ideas I've ever heard coming out of the US government. Here's to hoping Schmidt uses his veto power on this one.
They have something similar in Iran - for all the wrong reasons. Although even there, they don't dare sever themselves from the 21st century economy entirely, and that has left enough gaps for circumvention software.
Turning the internet off is something that can't be used for good. It's a tool of repression and anyone who supports it sees themselves as likely to benefit by repression.
I tried to make this same argument in another thread and was down voted for it, so here goes...
Any act of electronic warfare has an equivalent physical response. Regulation such as this is nothing more than power grabs by government and the defense industry.
I think that it's hard to make the case for open warfare when you can't prove that it was the (for example) the Chinese government that launched the attack. Or are you suggesting a covert retaliatory attack?
Open war, covert actions, or economic sanctions would work fine on a state v state level.
In the case of non state actors, current policing methods should be sufficient. In the cases where its not (and there is sufficient cause) covert policing actions should not be ruled out.
So in the event that the main Internet goes down, for whatever reason, who wants to help buy up a bunch of wireless routers (and other applicable items) to start forming a giant mesh network? Neighborhood by neighborhood... http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/Building_...
I find myself very conflicted about this. I think the wording of "kill switch" is an extremely poor choice so I will try to illustrate what I think the genuine national security reasoning is, using China as the hypothetical aggressor. The Chinese government controls all of the hubs which connect the internet in China to the rest of the world, the "great firewall" as some have called it. The chinese use this for censorship, but it also puts them in an advantageous situation during a conflict. Imagine the impact widespread denial of service attacks on financial and governmental institutions would have on a nations ability to wage war (read estonia). China could launch such attacks while effectively defending itself against similar attacks from foreigners. The chinese subset of the internet would continue to function while blocked off from the rest of the world.
With that in mind it seems like the "kill switch" should kill or limit connections to outside the United States. That said, the power this would give the domestic leadership may pose a greater threat to liberty than a foreign aggressor. I think I agree with philwelch.. I would rather see the plans to do this confidentially drawn up by the CIA than written into law.
Any kind of attack can already be filtered by the top tier ISPs around the country, and if it's really serious they'll unplug anything Obama asks them to. I just don't see how any kind of mass internet attacks can be a real threat to the USA.
We've had bad things happen on the internet so many times that we're pretty much immune to them now.
Agreed, not to mention that the real bread and butter of our nations military and intelligence networks are completely separate from what we know as the internet.
There is a huge difference between taking, say, whitehouse.gov or army.mil down verse our real command and control networks--which are probably next to impossible to take down considering there are layers upon layers of backup communication systems.
The idea of a "cyber-attack" being used as a first salvo in an act of war against the United States by any nation-state is pretty ludicrous, as it would minimally (if at all) affect our ability to destroy whoever was dumb enough to try it.
You nailed it. I was going to mention the EMP stuff, but backed away.
A high altitude nuclear detonation above the continental US is the first strike protocol for any nation-state that would try to attack us. Even then, a lot of our military's core command and control infrastructure has been hardened to withstand such an EMP for decades--as it was known that a high altitude detonation over US soil was the Soviet's plan for a first strike...That is why Cuba was such a big deal. Still, the EMP would completely decimate every non-hardened electrical system.
Reposting a commend I made on this topic when it came up sourced from Infowars...
Unintended consequences aside, this is less about a kill switch or government censorship and more about forcing a industry that has not taken security seriously to get their act together.
Many providers don't actively police their customers for botnet activity or respond to security incidents that don't affect their network infrastructure or back office systems.
This appears to establish a regulatory framework where network security officially becomes more than a law enforcement issue and lets DHS order operators to secure their networks and help out if they are unable to do so.
b. Once a new power is in place, it will be used, and not just for whatever the original intent was. We separate policy from mechanism in software for a reason. It works in law too.
As for A, it became the government's job when provider apathy with regard to infected clients and hosts with botnet controllers etc permitted a situation to arise where the means of a (supposed) attack for a foreign power is actually based within the US. At that point it stopped being a private security issue and became a national security issue.
I don't like it, but the problem it addresses does exist.
How would you separate policy from mechanism in this case?
Things that are critical to national security should be able to defend themselves from botnets (most likely by firewalling themselves from the public Internet). I think these threats are vastly overstated, mostly by people trying to get more power in to the hands of the government.
As for shutting down hosts involved in a bot net, a court order can do that in an emergency already. Sure, it adds a delay, but it also adds oversight and separates policy from mechanism. The executive branch controls the policy, while the courts control the mechanism.
Killing the internet would seriously disrupt the flow of information, information that is integral to remedy any attack and the psychological welfare of those affected.
A Weather Service Style Notification Service would be much more beneficial, that is unless that is skynet is controlling the robots.
Awesome. Let's give The Prez the ability to leverage a massive-scale worldwide denial of service attack at his every whim before the Evil Haxors can pound their script kiddie tools through the firewall. Way to go.
An Internet 'kill switch' is akin to a 'slash and burn' tactic. e.g. 'They' are using our road system to attack us, so we mine our road system. In the end, nobody wins. Even if we defeat 'them' we have to pick up the pieces that we left ourselves.
Actually, this is an excellent analogy. Nobody would believe that mining the Interstate highway system in case enemies used it to invade would be a good idea. But put the word "computer" next to anything else and most people's brains just switch off.
I think that the main reason they are trying to do this is that so many government networks and even utilities are hooking up to the Internet, so they want to be able to shut out 'invaders' if there is a bad attack happening.
The problem with this is that maybe those networks/utilities SHOULDN'T BE ON THE PUBLIC INTERNET. If the military or other government agencies can't defend themselves appropriately, then maybe they should invest in rolling out a completely separate network just for US government purposes. Hell, they did it once (i.e APRANet).
Good point! These morons always say, "But a hacker could destroy our electrical power grid!" and I always wonder why is the power grid accessible on the Internet? What idiot thought that was a good idea, and can't we fire him or her and take the grid back off the Internet? Like, today?
Hmmm things would have to pretty dire to need to do this, can you imagine the financial repercussions for thousands upon thousands of business if they were irrecoverably disconnected from their servers & clients for a unknown period?
Agreed, not to mention that the real bread and butter of our nations military and intelligence networks are completely separate from what we know as the internet.
There is a huge difference between taking, say, whitehouse.gov or army.mil down verse our real command and control networks--which are probably next to impossible to take down considering there are layers upon layers of backup communication systems.
The idea of a "cyber-attack" being used as a first salvo in an act of war against the United States by any nation-state is pretty ludicrous, as it would minimally (if at all) affect our ability to destroy whoever was dumb enough to try it.
