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Joe Lieberman’s Senate Homeland Security committee passed this week a "cybersecurity" bill that would expand the President’s powers and control of the Internet in a national emergency. In addition to Lieberman, the bill’s sponsors include Senators Tom Carper (D-DE) and Susan Collins (R-ME). But it was Collins’ defense of the bill that should send shivers up the spines of anyone who cares about the Internet:
"It’s been frustrating to read some of the misrepresentations of our bill in the cybersphere," Collins said, arguing the new bill actually circumscribes the president’s existing authority and puts controls on its use. "I believe the substitute amendment we’re offering strengthens those protections even more."
"Misrepresentations in the cybersphere." This is a person who has no idea what they’re talking about. No one who knows, or even uses, the Internet would dare utter the phrase, "cybersphere" in the year 2010. Next thing you know, Collins will defend the need to clear the blockages of the series of tubes that power the Internet.
Now, Collins was specifically referring to reports "in the cybersphere" that Lieberman’s bill created new authority for the President to use an "Internet kill switch" to shut down the Information Superhighway in the case of a national emergency. Collins is actually correct – the bill doesn’t create this authority, as it already exists in the Telecommunications Act of 1934. This bill, as Collins notes, affirms the authority the President already has to kill the Internet, radio, and other forms of communications. (Thanks to lotus in the comments at The Oil Drum for this information.)
The bill has been criticized by civil liberties and technology groups for its lack of protection for free speech in such an emergency. And for good reason; in addition to serious civil liberties concerns, it’s Joe Lieberman’s initial defense of the bill, and its affirmation of the Internet kill switch, that should make any American afraid:
“Right now China, the government, can disconnect parts of its Internet in case of war and we need to have that here too,” said Lieberman.
Saying the United States needs to be more like China in its control of citizens should be no way to approach regulation of the Internet, even in a national emergency. It’s just more evidence that people like Joe Lieberman, Susan Collins, and Ted Stevens should leave regulation of the Internet to people who actually know what they’re talking about.
40 Comments
The best reason the Government shouldn’t even touch the internet, is everything they touch they F-Up.
Could someone tell Me one thing in this Country that the Congress has fixed.
They created or ruined everything we used to have, deregulated us into recession and unemployment, ruined the housing market, ruined the whole economy, funded the wars and our Miltary, Deregulated and defended the Oil Industry into this oil spill. They have spent us into debt bad deficits, and put all our Social Progams at risk. They have our children in debt, and are forcing cuts in education, and putting people out of work, off unemployment, and watering down any reforms they try to make.
The Republicans made the messes while they were in office, kept reforms from being implemented, and now are convincing the Country they should be back in power.
Anyone who thinks they should be alowed to put their pinkies on the internet is insane.
We’ll when John Boehner is speaker of the House, and Mitch McConnell is the leader of the senate the internet will become like FOX NEWS.
In case you missed it, the Internet and World Wide Web were the result of government initiatives.
But of course, we’ve now had a couple of decades of people going out of their way to prove that government is incompetent by doing everything they can to make the claims come true.
There seems to be a direct correlation between incompetent government and those who do their damnedest to make it so.
Does that mean that people in Government that had vision back then, and were instramental in the internet coming to be, will have any influence over the people in power today who want to limit it, control it, and tax it.
It’s not like Government just got incompetent, or was made that way by people saying it is so.
We’ve had a couple hundred years for Government to mess up everything the Founding Fathers wanted for us, and their has been a go to the moon type program in the last couple decades to distroy the rest faster.
I’m glad You still feel people are to hard on Government, even the devil needs someone to defend him.
I’m not arguing that a lot of areas of today’s government are incompetent. I’m just saying that it is directly related to folks who claimed it was useless even when it wasn’t so have pretty much created a self-fulfilling prophecy by doing all in their power to make it so.
Yea! They kept voting, electing, and re-electing the same people and parties that are breaking the Government.
So they did make it so, and took away any chance we ever have of fixing it, by letting those people rule us, instead of being our Representatives like they were supposed to be.
If yer referring to the 27% Reaganiacs then you need to consider they are in bed with the government, they’ve helped enable the purchase of said government by corporations, and Obama is just finishing off the job that the ReThugs couldn’t get done.
Government and corporations are functioning at a high level of their desires.
They own us.
That’s efficiency.
The yelling and screaming of ‘bad government’ is a kabuki smoke screed to keep the false memes alive and pretend there’s two parties.
And yes, all the pork of the politicians lends to bad government . . . like $200 hammers and toilet seat lids.
But let’s keep our focus on the fact this is a purely 100% fascist country we now live in, owned and operated from top to bottom by the corporations and the elected offals and the political system is part and parcel of it all, serving the corps, not us.
But then, you know that, doncha, hoss . . ;-)
uucp and bang paths will work as long as local POTS exists. Not as conveniently of course, but information can and will flow.
In terms of corporate fascism, along with all you mention in your comment, is a desire to control the internet and use it to track dissidents such as us Pups . . . . and prevent us from having access to quick, fast and state of the art communications is shit DOES go to hell.
So, it’ ain’t really nothing but another step to pure control of a fascist country.
That’s what the lack of jobs bills is all about, too. Keep ‘em poor, too poor for cable and internet and food and healthcare, etc.
The 1% fears the rest of us, greatly, and so they look to suppress us in any manner they can till we are completely subdued.
But then, you should know that, huh . . . . ;-)
So China is now the model for how a “democracy” and freedom of speech should be handled, huh Joe?
So much for that oath to the Constitution that you swore.
On being like China: I published the editorial below (Genocide Olympics) you-can-guess-when. Soon afterward, I got an angry comment from the Chinese Government, which has since been withdrawn. I got lots of other hateful comments from people defending China’s Genocide Olympics. Then somehow someone blew our YouTube channel off the “air.” In a few days, we were able to get it running again. I don’t want US to be more like China.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD9osW0-ty8
Didn’t Al Gore invent the Internet? ;)
why yes, yes he did.
Ya got that right!! Oh wait I was on the “Internet” in 81… oops.. and when it became public in the early 90′s…. was different then…
If they want the entire country to come to a screeching halt, with pipelines blowing up and powerlines shorting out, yeah, they can kill the internet.
Has anyone explained to these people that businesses, including public utilities, use the internet to run everything? And that government does this also?
(I’m looking forward to their reaction when they discover that that kill switch they’re talking about will kill their text messaging services as well as their office computers.)
That would require them to have thought through the impact of their knee jerk responses.
Which we know from watching them is a totally foreign concept.
Maybe even a nuclear power station could go critical or even worse some of these chemical refineries go critical… The ramifications go on and on… Just another reason why the “Internet” must be open and unfettered,& Free, regulated yes but unfettered in the original design…
Doesn’t matter, the MOTU want complete control of we the people in all and any events.
They only want us to know what they will tell us, and they DON’T want the DFH’s planning and organizing to do bad things like taking care of each other, in times of war OR peace.
Ya gotta think like a fascist to understand how ugly it and they are these MOTU.
We can criticize them and blame them till we’re blue in the face, it serves little to our favor.
We need to change this balance of control and power someway.
Cuz right now, they are doing all they want out in the open whenever they want.
Lack of Gulf Efforts I thinks is ample evidence, along with post Katrina, and all the damage Obama, his admin, Congress, and the Judiciary have done and continue to do. Citizens United.
It’s corporate fascism, all the time, and we’re losing hard, hoss, we’re losing hard, on every stinking front of human decency, compassion, ambition and the thriving of our species.
PJ — You have to read the fine print. This bill would give the President the power to order specific websites, hosts, ISPs, etc., to suspend operations. That means that during protest demonstrations or times of civil unrest he could shut down Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Hulu, FDL, HuffPo, etc., but keep the rest of the internet functioning. And all he has to do is claim there is a threat of a cyber attack. Or concoct a phony, make-believe, false flag threat as justification. How difficult would it be to dummy-up something like that? Even easier than the way Bush dummied-up the WMD story to justify the invasion of Iraq.
He could also cut off local or regional portions of the web. Say there’s a big demonstration in L.A. You force the local telephone companies and cable systems to cease streaming the net, the rest of the country continues to work just fine. Same with NYC, Chicago, Dallas, etc.
If the internet had been in operation in the 60′s and 70′s, with this kind of law Nixon or LBJ could have short-circuited (or sabotaged) lots of the campus and civic anti-war or civil rights protest marches.
They’ve been wiretapping since who knows when.
They have a database of every dissenting and progressive minded comment in our homeland.
They have a plan to kill the access to our emails and using our emails, to cut us off from the web thru the telco’s.,
Easy.
Now they’re trying to legalize it all.
And I bet, they don’t even need a war to begin it. They’ll start it one by no doubt.
We have a GWOT, anyhoots, so ANY dissent can be curbed. Even political criticism for voting purposes.
How soon? Don’t know . . . you got a guess?
why don’t these idiots realize that in case of an emergency that the Internet would be extremely valuable for spreading warnings and news?
They want total and dominant control, they want US to only know what they tell us.
If they don’t tell us anything, they want us like mushrooms, fed shit and kept in the dark.
They’re not stupid, these things are what they WANT!!!
They WANT the complete, and utter control of us.
Stupid the 1% and corps and elected offals, are not.
Ah, so THIS is why the Democrats let Lieberman keep his chairmanship of the Fatherland Insecurity Committee: so that when he attempts to foist authoritarian legislation like this on us, the Dems can say: well, it wasn’t a Democratic proposal.
This whole issue is beyond me, other than the obvious observation that we have yahoos in Congress messing with something they have no clue on. Has Collins or Leiberman or any of these other proponents of this legislation described a scenario in which it would be in the interests of the citizenry for the internet to be shut down. It’s like they think some foreign power is going to take over the emergency broadcast system and make my Mac show me nothing but propaganda or something. I don’t understand why I would ever want my internet connection shut off. Can someone help a brother understand?
Perhaps some techies can help me out on this, but I’m extremely skeptical that anybody could seriously damage the internet. It is decentralized in the extreme. Indeed, there is nothing man made that is more decentralized. Talk of an attack on the internet strikes me as analogous to an attack on the interstate highway system. Sure you could attack a piece of it, but you couldn’t attack the whole thing and you wouldn’t shut down the whole thing if a piece got attacked. So wtf?
I suspect if the president ( whomsoever ever he/she might be at the time) shut down “the internets” the geeks would have them back up in the next hour or so………….at least in DOS if nothing else.
We’d use uucp.
(ignore)
They’ll do it; as Bush said ” our enemies never stop thinking up ways to harm US and neither do we”
they can’t Do one godsdamned thing that’s good for the people of this country
No, they won’t do one thing to help us, that’s not what they want.
They don’t WANT to help us, in any way, shape or form.
They want us gone, reduced down numbers wise, and starving and complicit and compliant for any shreds of crumbs they throw those they need to labor for them.
Jon Walker is upstairs!
Washington State Democratic Party Endorses Marijuana Legalization
Kit Bond has rival legislation that does not sound like a real improvement
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/06/27/1845255
There is also a plan for National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace
I follow you now wmd1961. My bad.
Even if you could, wouldn’t ‘shutting down’ the internet even for a few minutes destroy the world economy?
But you can’t shut the internet down, only limit access.
It’s the Infobahn, Lieberman.
Please get your outdated nomenclature correct.
Though “cybersphere” isn’t actually vintage. It’s simply stupid.
“Cyber” from the Greek: steersman, pilot, helmsman; to steer, guide, govern, governor.
“Sphere” from Middle English 1530s, restored spelling of M.E. spere (c.1300) “space, conceived as a hollow globe about the world,” from O.Fr. espere (13c.), from L. sphæra “globe, ball, celestial sphere,” from Gk. sphaira “globe, ball,” of unknown origin.
Cybersphere: An overweight sailor.
Scarecrow is upstairs!
NYT’s Nocera Repeats Oil Industry Propaganda Against Drilling Moratorium
dakine01 is upstairs!
Late Night: Reflections On Our Shared Humanity
Dude, not when the government shuts off the phone services. And they will. To citizens.
They have the power to tell AT&T who and when to shut off.
And as we know, AT&T and all phone lines are already onboard with wiretapping.
They don’t serve we the people anymore than our elected offals do.
One blink, and poof, by by your telly lines, any Sat Links, cable access, etc.
This ‘kill switch’ already exists . . . . the kabuki is to move the present laws to DO it, further under the Executive.
Just like Bush, establish the Executive as a Unitary Body. Obama’s doin a great job of it, too.
Michael, my bad, great post and thanks, rcc’d of course.
The basis of the Internet is the DNS. All the government would do is block DNS. There are numerous modalities these days of communicating that don’t require DNS. But they wouldn’t even go this far as there are major stakeholders in the Internet, from international backbone infrastructure to neighborhood lemonade stands.
This is missing the point by a parsec.
The Internet was developed to survive nuclear war – re-routing around any damaged infrastructure. It did not need a president to “route around problems”, and if it does now, than that’s due to corporate or imbecile engineering having wrecked the initial robustness. If that is the case, putting another high-ranking imbecile into another vulnerable centralized position of privilege will not fix the alleged problem. But then, the emergencies to survive here might simply be news blackouts needed in case of clsuterfucks a bit faster and more sweeping than BPatrina.