

Lieberman tells Web users to ‘relax’ about ‘kill switch’ - steveklabnik
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0620/lieberman-relax-kill-switch/

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waivej
That's a great idea! They should do the same thing to all of our utilities
like water, sewer, electricity, etc.

For what it's worth: A friend used to host his website. The night before an
election, they had two expensive dedicated servers running full tilt (static
website). That was expensive so Lieberman switched to shared hosting with
someone else for the next election. When his website shut down (with some sort
of "over quota" text), he blamed his opponent for "hacking" it.

I suppose it's hard to tell the difference between a DDOS attack and lots of
website visitors, but a skilled technician is expensive and smarter than a
hosting control panel.

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mcknz
"We've been hacked" just sounds so much better than "we were too cheap to pay
for all our loyal supporters."

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tptacek
As the person on Hacker News least likely to be generous to Joe Lieberman's
perspective on anything, and most particularly inclined to think poorly of
anything he has to say about the balance of civil rights and national
security, and, unfortunately, one of the small-ish number of active HN people
who deal with the problems "shutting off parts of the Internet" would attempt
to solve, let me just say one thing.

I think he's right.

IAmA person who thinks he might manage to defend this crazy-sounding Lieberman
argument. Ask me anything. I may not be able to answer everything, though.

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ihodes
Explain to me why this would be a good idea.

Where I stand, giving to one person the power to completely disable the
primary and most efficient way of communication is frightening and awful.

The reasoning behind it? We can stop communications from attacking countries
in times of war.

The reality is that there are many other modes of communication for the kind
of 1 to 1 communication an attacker would need, but there are far fewer ways
for the type of 1 to 1000's communication activists and thinkers need.

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tptacek
I don't think the reasoning behind this has much to do with "communications",
but has rather a lot more to do with the industrial and financial
infrastructural systems that have ended up connected in one way or another to
the Internet.

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krakensden
Wouldn't it make more sense to disconnect them from the internet than to try
and shutdown communication to/from some sections of the world? The ability to
momentarily create a strong perimeter defense doesn't make much sense to me-
it would only work against an attacker that didn't plan for it.

As soon as the world knows you have a kill switch, any organized attack will
have domestic components, and which means that you still have the possibility
of the president screwing up the normal economy, but no additional defense.

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noonespecial
Even if the Americans do decide that the president has the authority to "kill
the internet", they get to use this power exactly once.

Then the rest of the world routes around it and doesn't let the US become a
single point of failure again.

The reasonable side of the argument is that what they really want to be able
to do is air-gap the US should it find itself under attack by the rest of the
internet. Unfortunately, right now, so much of the internet routes through the
US that doing this is almost the same thing as shutting down the internet.

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tptacek
You are assuming that the idea is actually to "kill the Internet", and not
that it is just horribly, horribly miscommunicated using that concept. What if
instead of this they were saying something like "we may at some point need to
kill all traffic from all ISPs going to any IP address with the ASN 31336 and
a TCP destination port of 80 or 5151"?

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MichaelSalib
This is absurd. If there's a valid reason justifying the kill switch, it
should be clearly communicated by Lieberman. It is not the job of anyone here
to ferret out Liberman's justifications; it is Lieberman's job to explain
himself. He has a website. He makes frequent media appearances and he often
communicates with journalists. If given all that, he remains completely
incapable of communicating his ideas clearly, then he clearly is far too
incompetent to be a US Senator.

Perhaps I'm wrong. Is there any reason to believe that Lieberman has been
prevented from clearly explaining his ideas on his own website?

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tptacek
I'm not even a little bit interested in debating the merits of Joe Lieberman
with you.

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wmeredith
I'm loathe to find myself on the same side as Lieberman, but giving The
President the power to "kill switch" the internet seems like it's not THAT big
of a deal considering he has a secret service guy following him around with a
briefcase that he can use launch nukes.

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cmelbye
As Commander in Chief of the US military (as determined by the Constitution),
it makes sense for him to have that power. However, shutting down parts of the
Internet is unconstitutional because as far as I'm aware, it doesn't grant
that power to the President (and by "that power", I don't mean specifically
shutting down the Internet. I mean the idea behind it).

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lewi
Right... so this will liberate the Americans?

All this is, is another way of controlling speech. The internet is the last
truly open medium. To allow the government to shut it off because of War or
other reasons would be ridiculous. This 'switch' violates freedom of speech by
isolating Americans from parts or all of the now 'World' wide web.

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k33n
This would require all internet traffic (seemingly) to be routed through a
bunch of points controlled directly by the executive branch. My big brother
alarms are a-buzzing.

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tptacek
No, but it might require all default-free ISPs to honor some kind of court
order requiring them to install certain ACLs.

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jawn
It does not matter where the decision to shut off traffic is made.

Be it court order to load an ACL or a central routing point, the outcome is
the same. Take a look at FISA warrant approval rates if you think judicial
oversight means anything in the face of national security.

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tptacek
I'm not sure what your point is. Are FISA warrants granted far too freely? I'm
sure they are. And yet FISA safeguards were problematic enough for the Bush
administration that Cheney and his legal team had to go through contortions to
create an end-run around them. Read "Angler", the (excellent) book on Cheney's
role in the previous administration, for more on that.

But be that as it may: whether the system is abused in the future or not, it
seems to me hard to refute the idea that unfettered connectivity to a network
that has been (perhaps negligently) connected to critical infrastructure
around the country is something that the executive branch _will_ have to
address.

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jawn
I was responding directly to your attempts to diffuse big brother concerns by
implying judicial review would occur.

The requirement of judicial oversight does not preclude big brother attempts
at censorship. Particularly when the courts feel they are deciding issues of
national security. Your citation of the Bush administration does nothing but
affirm this point.

Taking your argument about critical infrastructure at face value (which is
still a big leap, as you've yet to define any concrete scenarios other than a
power outage), there are better ways of achieving the same end goal without
denying american citizens their natural and constitutionally affirmed rights.

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hngryhppos
I may have missed this, but what kind of event is this supposed to protect
against? Does anyone know the scenarios that Lieberman is worried about?

