

Ask HN: Is it true that US President could "shut down" Internet? - barredo

Well, I don't know much about Internet infrastructure, DNS and ISPs, but I keep reading the same 'new US Senate Bill would give President the right to shut down Internet' these days.<p>How is so? Will the US President able to shut down Internet worldwide or just in the US? If worldwide, what could Europe, China, India and the rest of the world do to avoid it?
======
frossie
No dude.

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-
policy/news/2010/03/presidents-v...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-
policy/news/2010/03/presidents-veto-power-over-internet-removed-in-amended-
bill.ars)

For the record, even if every ISP in the US agreed to shut down, no the rest
of the world would not be "shut down", except for US-based services going off
the air, or to the extent that they house their services on US-based servers.

The origin of the Internet lies exactly in the requirement that it be "self-
healing". You can read an early history here:

<http://zitthere.com/tech/networks/internet/inet-hist.html>

~~~
Elrac
frossie, I mostly agree with you but I wanted to bring up a couple of points:

* As you mentioned, the Prez' authority is (mostly) limited to the US. I say "mostly" because the US has been known to exert economic and even military pressure on other countries that didn't toe the line of US interests. Shutting down the US corner of the Internet would take about 13% of worldwide Internet _users_ offline; in terms of infrastructure and services, I'd wager it would be lots more. Consider that Google, Yahoo, MSN and lots of other globally significant sites are US based.

* Something else to consider: Who runs the DNS root servers? Isn't internic run by a US company? In theory, DNS is redundant; in practice, I think loss of the root servers would kick up a lot of disturbance. AFAIK the Internet would be crippled for most intents and purposes without DNS.

~~~
devicenull
DNS root servers are (mostly) handled by anycast. There's not really any one
server to shut down: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_nameserver>

------
olefoo
I was under the impression that the draft bill currently under discussion
gives the president authority to order telecommunications providers to depeer
or null route private networks from the public internet, under "emergency
conditions". Presumably a technologically adept adversary would be able to
bypass these sorts of interruptions and would maintain some form of "shadow
network" to keep their access.

I personally think that creating this capability is a bad idea for two
reasons; it weakens the redundancy of the network, and it provides an
attractive target for black hat hackers. Any element bent on creating problems
would know that the best way to do so would be to figure out how to forge a
presidential emergency shutdown order.

------
mustpax
Generally speaking, no. There are plenty of connections between ISPs outside
the US that don't go through the US that you'd probably still end up with a
connected network minus the machines in the US. I would guess there would be
latency and throughput problems though.

If they were really malicious, US based ISPs could cripple the internet by
"hijacking" IP addresses that don't belong to them. The internet backbone
mostly operates based on trust, if you're part of the backbone you are free to
broadcast false routing rules that forward legitimate traffic to a black hole.
Still I don't think this would last very long, it's just a matter of time
before other ISPs purge the bad rules and get routing working again.

------
korch
I don't think anyone knows whether the entire Internet could be shut down. It
has never happened, so there is zero empirical data to build an expectation.
Obviously, the decentralized nature of the Internet makes it nearly impossible
to shut it down 100%. Perhaps we'll get to test this empirically in a few
years when the predicted increase in Solar storms fries a big portion the
World's electronics.

However, I'd bet dollars to donuts that there exists a highly classified plan
to shutdown the majority of the Internet if truly necessary for an
extraordinary emergency. The DoD make plans for everything they might need to
handle and they get $500+ billion a year carte blanche. If you had 100 cruise
missiles, a dozen nuclear subs, thousands of special forces teams and around
50 spy satellites, how hard would it be to shatter the Internet into countless
disconnected networks?

This is a fun and practical math problem in optimization and graph theory:
What's the minimal number of cut undersea cables, missiled satellites, bombed
microwave stations, and blown up peer exchanges and telecom backbone data
centers to cause the maximal number of disconnected networks?

What if the exact answer is 42?

(I won't say "42 of what?", since it could refer to any number of things, but
what if 99% of the Internet could be reduced to a finite list of attack
targets, given the logistical ability to attack them?)

Does the US gov't have the resources to pull off these kind of logistics in a
true WTSHTF emergency?

Yes, I think so.

At the very least, they need to know how to stop any potential enemies from
shutting down the Internet, so in order to know how to protect it they also
need to know how to destroy it.

