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.
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.