[governance] Could the U.S. shut down the internet?

[Lee W McKnight]

Hey Karl,

Yeah I always knew there were 'secure' folks doing work for 40 years while civilian side folks either didn't or pretended not to know why exactly DOD thought packet-switched architectures were worth billions back when the b stood for - a lot of money.

So I'm not suggesting any of these bills could really make it all that easy just like that to truly shut things down.

Which definitely is a feature and not a bug, and a tip of the cap again to you and the other veterans for doing a great job back in the day.

Still it's a positive of the Egyptian uprising that US senators - and President Obama, and even DHS - now won't want to be publicly associated with..Mubarak, and/or 'kill/switch' bills.

Lee 
________________________________________
From: governance-request at lists.cpsr.org [governance-request at lists.cpsr.org] On Behalf Of Karl Auerbach [karl at cavebear.com]
Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2011 5:51 PM
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org
Subject: Re: [governance] Could the U.S. shut down the internet?

On 02/03/2011 07:05 AM, Lee W McKnight wrote:

> To: Lee W McKnight
> Subject: I just saw it on CNN.com: Could the U.S. shut down the internet?
>
> Just as I predicted, the Senators proposing the Presidential Internet 'kill-switch' bill

Uh, when we were building the proto-internet (the ARPAnet) we built it
to keep running despite the best efforts of a full fledged nuclear
attack from the old USSR.

(Perhaps the reason for the stories that say that security against
attack was not a goal arise because the technical community was severely
partitioned back then into a public-research side, which we hear about,
and a military side, which was very much out of the public eye, and even
subject to military classification rules - even open work we did for the
old US National Bureau of Standards [now NIST] has never seen the
digital light of day - at best it is part of what Vernor Vinge called
digital "prehistory" in his book "Rainbows End".)

DNS *does* represent a residual single point of failure/attack/killswitch.

But the dogma of the singular, catholic (lower case 'c') DNS root is
just a dogma.  (The real issue is not singularity of a DNS root but,
rather, consistency of DNS query results.)

        --karl--
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