In this world ever plagued by whispers of conspiracy and oppressive government authoritarianism, US Senators have recently added new fuel to the fires of antagonism. Lately, a bill has begun to re-circulate in the Senate, one that would give the president control of the thing Americans cherish most in all of the free world: LOLcats
CNET News reported this week that a controversial bill allotting President Obama control over privately owned hardware and computer networks during “a cybersecurity emergency” is back in consideration. The bill was first sponsored in June of 2010 by Independent Senator Joe Lieberman, who, in a quote, said its purpose was to “preserve those networks and assets and our country and protect our people.”
Ignoring the blatantly meaningless PR rhetoric, this is not the first bill of its kind. Several past pieces of legislation have attempted at obtaining some sort of control over whatever “crucial components that form our nation’s critical infrastructure.” What’s more, the bill provides that under such circumstances that the legislation is put to use, the action would not be reviewable by the Supreme Court.
To anyone reading, the move smacks highly of authoritarianism, and appears to blatantly violate First Amendment laws, not to mention Judicial Review. I know, people rant and rave about freedom of speech all the time, but I won’t be the first to leave it out.
My first question is, how can the government justify this measure in the technical sense? The bill itself states that the measure does not apply to “a national security system or information infrastructure that is owned, operated, (or controlled by) the Department of Defense, a military department, or another element of the intelligence community.”
What other “crucial components” are there? The bill aims only at controlling the servers that operate Yahoo!, eBay, Facebook, and any other private domains of the like. The only thing an internet kill-switch like this would accomplish is shutting down modes of public networking and communication (and, conveniently, the ability to download WikiLeaks documents).
Cyberattacks have become increasingly common over the past few years, though, and the need to protect military communications networks and the government’s electronic infrastructure is entirely necessary. More so, the need to protect major economic servers is very high. Economic terrorism is a shiny, new way to cripple US infrastructure, vis-à-vis crashing the stock market.
But servers and ethernets at Wall Street, the Pentagon and the White House are already as redundantly firewalled and password protected as humanly possible, and have little to no connections with the greater internet cloud. Nobody StumblesUpon government communication lines, you can’t “poke” the president.
The ability to shut down the internet (if it’s actually even possible) would only succeed in disabling the most efficient and reliable means of communication we have. It would be much harder to fry the entire internet than to cripple cell phone coverage across the US. I would think security officials would be more concerned with strengthening the endurance of their own networks during a “cyberemergency”, rather than concern themselves with making sure all the world’s Tweets don’t get tampered with, or (heaven-forbid) erased.
The most alarming thing I found in skimming over the bill, in all of its dense wordage and rhetoric, is that it contains language that very loosely defines “the violation of…acceptable use policies” as justification to cut the cord.
Acceptable use policies? What exactly constitutes acceptable use? Are the authors of this bill attempting to include some sort of Necessary and Proper Clause? Now is absolutely not the time to be flaky about defining your terms.
The bill has become highly contested, and most opinions are that it will die once more. The majority of the internet community does not seem to be giving it much concern either. My only hope is that, if anything does come from it, Anonymous will be there to protect us.
