Here's the newest internet kill switch story: this is juicy...

[originalpckelly]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=9752990&mesg_id=9752990

That thread discusses a story from earlier this year, June to be precise. Basically, it's about a law to give the President the power to kill the internet in case of a cyber attack. I can see why the poster would put up something like that now, considering the fact that we just went through a little cyberwar, or maybe a cyber battle.

Here's the juicy part:
That story was about a law being proposed to give the President the authority to kill the internet in case of emergency. BUT it may be a reaction to the fact that Obama's administration unilaterally declared they had the power to kill the internet in an emergency, using a law from the 1940s as their source of power.

From the story itself:
"Under a World War II-era law, the US president appears to have authority to disconnect computer systems and servers from the internet in the event of a national emergency. But the next US Congress is poised to change that.

The law was passed in 1942. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had provoked fear of a foreign invasion of US soil, and Congress responded by giving President Franklin Roosevelt broad power to commandeer or shutter telephone and telegraph networks.

Nearly 70 years later, telegraph networks have disappeared, and the telephone is only one of many means of communication.

But although the 1942 law makes no mention of the internet - merely of "any facility or station for wire communication" - the Obama administration in June told Congress it would cite it in an emergency.

It has not been tested in court, but experts say section 706(d) of the Communications Act could give the president wide-ranging authority to shut down key computer systems.

With typical Washington hyperbole, the law has become known as the presidential "internet kill switch"."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11736545

That's the most recent story on this I can find with Google News.

All of this is interesting, would the people around the President or the President himself do something like that? I guess if they claim they can, then maybe they would. I don't know what to make of it.

Here is the testimony referred to in the story:
http://hsgac.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.View&FileStore_id=a9c43092-b090-419c-afb4-c5b44bfeae23

I can't find where they claim this yet, but I'm a dork, so forgive me, it's probably there somewhere.

What do you think of this stuff in light of recent events?

[htuttle]

1. They would effectively switch off the economy at the same time

...and the markets, and the media. Pretty much everything.

It would, in fact, strike against the interests of the elite more than the poor. A lot of the poor can't even get on the internet. Even China doesn't really want to cut themselves off completely, since there is so much money to be made by being connected.

Don't see it happening.

[leveymg]

2. If say, we were to start a war with Iran, they would switch off selected sites - like this one.

Sears, Mastercard and NYT.com would likely stay up.

[originalpckelly]

4. What the hell is this shit though. Is he fucking Bush?

Where does his Administration get off thinking they can just assume on to themselves power that was clearly not originally intended in the law? I mean, if the fucking internet didn't exist when the law was written, I find it pretty damn hard to assume the people writing the law contemplated the unique nature of the internet in the law, and crafted the law to govern that unique nature.

You see this is what's wrong with this country. This government is just assuming it has power without it ever really being given to it. It's like we're living in the freaking Commonwealth or something, a model where all power is assumed to exist with the Crown and is then delegated to the people. In America, we're supposed to believe, and it explicitly states this in the US Constitution, that power resides with the people first or the States. The people or the States then give it to the freaking government.

From the US Constitution, The Tenth Amendment:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

The same thing happened with wiretapping in the first place. The government just assumed it had the power to listen in on the conversations of the people in this country. It was not until Katz v. The United States that we even had the right to have our telephone conversations private. And even then, you can use the same idea, that there was no contemplation of the unique nature of a telephone under the US Constitution by it's framers. Why should the government even have the right to do such a thing, without an amendment specifically delegating the power to the US Government?

Living laws give us things like torture. If you find it acceptable to redefine shit in a law, even against the spirit of the law, like was done with torture, you can pretty much come up with violations of the law's original purpose as being legal.

If I say it's illegal to torture, but then later on some asshole comes along and defines torture in a way that exempts certain activities from being defined as torture, then you basically can torture. This is not theory, this is precisely what happened.

That's why this is all so fucked up. We need to assume that the power is not given to the government, until a law explicitly gives that power to the government. And if it is a whole new type of power, like telephone wiretapping, then it should have to be given in the form of an amendment. Perhaps it is a flaw of the US Constitution that it is so hard to amend.

[Edweird]

10. But, ironically, when it comes to campaign promises he's suddenly weak and powerless.

[ProfessionalLeftist]

3. Maybe they would just shut down 'non-commerce sites'

like - DU. Or even commerce ones if they were conducting commerce with "questionable" individuals or entities. But then we get into the definition of who/what is deemed "questionable".

Dunno. This is something we all probably ought to keep an eye on. What would they do? What can they do?

The wikileaks people recently said something to the effect of: "stop us? they'd have to shut down the internet"

?

[originalpckelly]

5. Who the fuck knows. It's dangerous to live in a nation that thinks it has these powers...

not by specific delegation of those powers to it, but through unilateral assumption of that power.

[Angry Dragon]

6. They keep telling us we are at war

Does the War Powers Act come into play??

If the president shut down part of the internet,
that would be looked at as the same as Martial Law I would think.

[originalpckelly]

7. I doubt it would actually happen. The posters above have shown...

that this is mainly for infrastructure. I guess it could be used to target other things, but it seems they are talking about infrastructure. What I find most disturbing is that no one seems to be noticing this UNILATERAL assumption of power. That's troubling.

[bemildred]

8. Bring it. nt

[DemReadingDU]

9. I think they could cut off Internet banking too

Online banking could be shut down to protect us from the 'terrorists' who might be moving electronically/
:shrug:

[ProgressiveProfessor]

11. Most people forget the Internet is a collection of private networks

The Feds only own their networks. TO assert that kind of control without justification or compensation is silly.