blogstein

Not too long ago there was a bit of buzz around a bill in Congress that would grant the office of the President the ability to shut off all or parts of the internet in the US. When put on camera to talk about the bill, our Vice President Lieberman made what I feel is a big mistake – he reached in his pocket to find an example of another country that takes this kind of control over the internet and pulled out… China. Now, I am not part of the camp that points to President Obama and screams “Communism!” but this comparison is one that Lieberman should have reconsidered! What a blunder, coming from an adminstration that is under fire for the socialist-leaning policies that it is implementing and simultaneously defending them as being a necessary part of preserving our republic!

But enough about the politics of it – I’m personally not a big fan of them anyhow. I’d rather focus on what this bill really should be: a call for better internet security. It’s not a secret anymore that our power grid has the potential to be taken down by a clever enough computer hacker – a Chinese graduate student even wrote his recent PhD thesis on the vulnerability of the American power grid and detailed the cascading failure that taking down a well-chosen power plant could cause (note that he also proposed alternative structures that could be used to prevent this cascade, so it is my opinion that the paper was not written maliciously, but was written to be informative). What this means is that we need to look at possible ways to secure our network, much like putting a firewall on it.

I believe this is the point of view that the bill used. What’s the easiest and most straight forward way to prevent your computer from getting a virus? Why, unplug it from the internet, of course! If you can get past the reminders of “V” or “Fahrenheit 451,” then this seems like a very reasonable proposal.

Perhaps what bothers everyone is the potential scope that is specified – or rather, not specified. What should be made clear in the bill is the intended scope of this kill switch. The scope that I would propose is when a threat is detected, the channel being used is immediately shut off. In this case, it would be desirable for our government to be very transparent about the nature of the threat, so that we can feel that the kill switch is not being abused.

This is perhaps all that would need to happen to keep us from losing any sleep over our potentially lost freedoms. Of course, some would counter that waiting for the threat to be detected would be too late – perhaps the damage has already been done. I would counter back that given some attention (and of course some funding) our country’s budding cyber security programs at our universities could easily come up with firewalls and network configurations that can deal with this. So in conclusion, focus less on the China comparison, and a lot more on the threat that it should prevent, if implemented properly.