This poll was inspired by Zak's comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2150376), which connected the recent claims that the Internet has been shut off in almost all of Egypt with the emerging possibility that the US President may be given those same rights. While I don't know much about the issue, it does seem as if it is a prominent and difficult debate with both sides have solid arguments. I set up this poll to see what the HN community thought about it.
Poll: Should the US President have an Internet kill-switch?
1–10 of 21 posts
Re: Poll: Should the US President have an Internet kill-switch?
#2Poorly defined question. What's an "Internet kill switch?" An executive order to shut down all routable ASes in the US? Legislative?
I think this question doesn't really have an answer because it's too poorly defined.
Re: Poll: Should the US President have an Internet kill-switch?
#3I am not tech enough to know, but could an ad-hoc network be created from people's wifi connections that could get around an internet backbone shutdown? At least it should work to connect people within urban areas, I would think.
Re: Poll: Should the US President have an Internet kill-switch?
#4That's like asking, "should the United States have free speech?" But it also has other implications as well. If our enemies have networks, and ours our disabled, how in the world are we going to "win"? How do you even "win" a "cyber war"?
You can prevent "cyber warfare" by disconnecting sensitive stuff. You don't need to kill Wikipedia or my blog because there's not much warfare you can really wage with pages that aren't sensitive in nature. How is an enemy going to abuse Remember The Milk or Reddit to the extent that it cripples our national security? So a kill switch is not only stupidly impractical because it makes us more disorganized and disconnected than an enemy, but also because it's strictly unconstitutional.
A better question: is there a sane justification for it?
Re: Poll: Should the US President have an Internet kill-switch?
#5Poorly defined question. What's an "Internet kill switch?" An executive order to shut down all routable ASes in the US? Legislative? I think this question doesn't really have an answer because it's too poorly defined.
It's an open question, certainly, but the broad meaning isn't vague. It's anything that would legally or technologically enable the Executive branch to disable public internet access in all or part of the United States at will.
I can't think up a way to make that a plausibly good thing to exist in any form.
Re: Poll: Should the US President have an Internet kill-switch?
#6I'm not sure what you hope to learn with this poll. The first few Google results for "internet kill switch" are all news media articles which explain the proposed law pretty clearly.
Re: Poll: Should the US President have an Internet kill-switch?
#7Early returns are pretty overwhelming.
Just curious: of the 98%-+ who are against the kill-switch, how many of you will be willing to help if there are some activism campaigns?
Re: Poll: Should the US President have an Internet kill-switch?
#8I'm not sure what you hope to learn with this poll. The first few Google results for "internet kill switch" are all news media articles which explain the proposed law pretty clearly.
Simple. I want to hear your opinions and interpretations on the idea. The raw facts are something I can find from sites that Google brings up (like you said). Opinions and facts are two different things that each have their own importance.
Re: Poll: Should the US President have an Internet kill-switch?
#9Poorly defined question. What's an "Internet kill switch?" An executive order to shut down all routable ASes in the US? Legislative? I think this question doesn't really have an answer because it's too poorly defined.
I don't even think it needs to be a switch. The actual bill that was brought up in the Senate doesn't explicitly say 'kill switch' anywhere. In reality a call from someone in the government to a few people who work at large ISPs/backbones would be enough, since they would just comply. We saw this happen recently with Wikileaks, after all....
Re: Poll: Should the US President have an Internet kill-switch?
#10I am not tech enough to know, but could an ad-hoc network be created from people's wifi connections that could get around an internet backbone shutdown? At least it should work to connect people within urban areas, I would think.
Sure. There are a few local projects along these lines, with limited success. See freifunk.net, for example. The main problem is that the range of WiFi is quite short even in denser urban areas (so you wind up with lots of fragmented micro-networks), and it requires significant effort from each participant to set up. If Fon started making this an optional feature on their routers, it could get really interesting.
Or maybe just a way of connecting Android phones into a local communication network.
Does anyone know if there's some formal spec for this kind of mesh network?