By David Gewirtz
it’s been an interesting week. For us here in America, and for most Internet users worldwide, we got to see — from the outside — what it looks like when a country drops offline.
It ain’t pretty.
In fact, it’s shockingly disturbing. It was Egypt, of course, that went dark for a week. That country, like many in the Middle East, is in turmoil for reasons far greater than Internet access.
But when Egypt went off the grid, we got to see just how much we — and by “we,” I mean the entire world — rely on our ability to connect to the Internet.
The Internet “kill switch” bill
That brings me to what the press has been calling the Internet “kill switch”. There’s a bill that’s working its way through the sausage factory we call the United States Congress. It’s officially called the “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act”.
The reason the press and bloggers have been calling this bill the “kill switch” bill is because one purpose of this bill is to give the President what would effectively be cyberspace war powers, and as the discussion goes, allow him (or her) to shut down America’s Internet, completely.
As a cyberwarfare adviser, I was originally a proponent of the idea of complete shutdown in times of extreme attack. I felt it might be necessary to completely shut out the attackers, and by turning everything off, an attack that might be spreading through botnets could be cut off at the neck.
Don’t get me wrong. Botnet-based attacks are absolutely terrifying, and in their worst case scenario, they could cause America grievous harm.
But I no longer believe that shutting everything off is a good idea. After watching what went on with Egypt and spending a week thinking about the issue from both a policy perspective as well as from the perspective of national defense, it’s become clear that a “kill switch” that can just shut everything off is a bad, bad idea.
There are a few of you out there who are sure to call me a “flip-flopper” because I changed my mind, but I reject that characterization completely. One way a scientist learns is through observation. Those observations become data reintroduced into whatever scientific model is currently being considered. To not integrate observations into the model is to be doctrinal, not scientific. That’s fundamentalist — as well as impractical.
I changed my mind because I got more information and, after integrating that information, came up with new conclusions based on more comprehensive data. That’s not flip-flopping. That’s thinking.
Why a “kill switch” is a bad idea
First, many of us would be completely cut off from the rest of the nation and from our families. More and more Americans communicate via the Internet and no longer use old-fashioned hard-wired phone lines. Many of us are mobile users or VoIP users, and all would be shut off.
More to the point, many online first responders would be cut off as well. It’d be as if we locked all our Marines inside a panic room. They wouldn’t do us much good cut off from the battle. The same is true of our first responders in cyberspace. If we shut off the Internet, we’d lose many of the network engineers we’ll need to fight back.
If we completely shut down the Internet, we also wouldn’t be able to install patches and fixes, or distribute them across the country. Many of us work remotely from the servers we manage and even our secure VPNs would be shut down, locking us out of the servers we’d need to protect, repair, or decontaminate.
If we completely shut down the Internet, our system engineers, computer scientists, and security officials would not be able to collaborate — even on secured connections — to fight back or recover from an attack.
Once the Internet was shut down, switching everything on at once could well be far worse than the original attack. If all our systems came back online at once, the loads on all our networks and systems would be tremendous, we’d allow in floods of new attacks, and the aftershocks could be far worse than the original attack we were defending against.
As valid as all those arguments are, there’s one more reason why a nationwide “kill switch” is a very bad idea.
It’s this: the Internet kill switch mechanism itself would have to be coordinated, integrated, and linked. That, alone, introduces a critical new highly-vulnerable failure point that could be targeted by attackers and terrorists.
So, now that we’re agreed that implementing a nationwide Internet “kill switch” is a bad idea, what about the “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act”?
it’s been an interesting week. For us here in America, and for most Internet users worldwide, we got to see — from the outside — what it looks like when a country drops offline. It ain’t pretty.
In fact, it’s shockingly disturbing. It was Egypt, of course, that went dark for a week. That country, like many in the Middle East, is in turmoil for reasons far greater than Internet access.
But when Egypt went off the grid, we got to see just how much we — and by “we,” I mean the entire world — rely on our ability to connect to the Internet.
The Internet “kill switch” bill
That brings me to what the press has been calling the Internet “kill switch”. There’s a bill that’s working its way through the sausage factory we call the United States Congress. It’s officially called the “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act”.
The reason the press and bloggers have been calling this bill the “kill switch” bill is because one purpose of this bill is to give the President what would effectively be cyberspace war powers, and as the discussion goes, allow him (or her) to shut down America’s Internet, completely.
As a cyberwarfare adviser, I was originally a proponent of the idea of complete shutdown in times of extreme attack. I felt it might be necessary to completely shut out the attackers, and by turning everything off, an attack that might be spreading through botnets could be cut off at the neck.
Don’t get me wrong. Botnet-based attacks are absolutely terrifying, and in their worst case scenario, they could cause America grievous harm.
But I no longer believe that shutting everything off is a good idea. After watching what went on with Egypt and spending a week thinking about the issue from both a policy perspective as well as from the perspective of national defense, it’s become clear that a “kill switch” that can just shut everything off is a bad, bad idea.
There are a few of you out there who are sure to call me a “flip-flopper” because I changed my mind, but I reject that characterization completely. One way a scientist learns is through observation. Those observations become data reintroduced into whatever scientific model is currently being considered. To not integrate observations into the model is to be doctrinal, not scientific. That’s fundamentalist — as well as impractical.
I changed my mind because I got more information and, after integrating that information, came up with new conclusions based on more comprehensive data. That’s not flip-flopping. That’s thinking.
Why a “kill switch” is a bad idea
First, many of us would be completely cut off from the rest of the nation and from our families. More and more Americans communicate via the Internet and no longer use old-fashioned hard-wired phone lines. Many of us are mobile users or VoIP users, and all would be shut off.
More to the point, many online first responders would be cut off as well. It’d be as if we locked all our Marines inside a panic room. They wouldn’t do us much good cut off from the battle. The same is true of our first responders in cyberspace. If we shut off the Internet, we’d lose many of the network engineers we’ll need to fight back.
If we completely shut down the Internet, we also wouldn’t be able to install patches and fixes, or distribute them across the country. Many of us work remotely from the servers we manage and even our secure VPNs would be shut down, locking us out of the servers we’d need to protect, repair, or decontaminate.
If we completely shut down the Internet, our system engineers, computer scientists, and security officials would not be able to collaborate — even on secured connections — to fight back or recover from an attack.
Once the Internet was shut down, switching everything on at once could well be far worse than the original attack. If all our systems came back online at once, the loads on all our networks and systems would be tremendous, we’d allow in floods of new attacks, and the aftershocks could be far worse than the original attack we were defending against.
As valid as all those arguments are, there’s one more reason why a nationwide “kill switch” is a very bad idea.
It’s this: the Internet kill switch mechanism itself would have to be coordinated, integrated, and linked. That, alone, introduces a critical new highly-vulnerable failure point that could be targeted by attackers and terrorists.
So, now that we’re agreed that implementing a nationwide Internet “kill switch” is a bad idea, what about the “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act”?
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