Cyber Insanity

A Senate bill (S.773) if passed would give the President of the United States the authority to declare a "cyber emergency" and close down the Internet by disconnecting users.

In addition, it will require professional IT people to be certified by the federal government, something that angers many IT technicians and those who believe in the First Amendment.

Having worked in the networking industry for two decades this borders on insanity. It is easier to do than you might think.

All ISPs end up connecting to one of 8 internet points of prescence in the US. These could be nationalized and shut off easily. The other issue is that the US owns and controls all 12 of the root DNS servers that allow people to find things by name. Shut them off and the global internet is effectively broken. Oh yeah, we also control address allocation as well. We could take a country off line by routing all traffic from that countries ip space to null with a few bgp entries .

This kind of control over our communication is crazy.

Reference: http://tinyurl.com/klq7yg