Wow. Really?
This article here mentions that a new bill being proposed that gives “absolute power” to “kill” the internet:
The federal government would have “absolute power” to shut down the Internet under the terms of a new US Senate bill being pushed by Joe Lieberman, legislation which would hand President Obama a figurative “kill switch” to seize control of the world wide web in response to a Homeland Security directive.
Yikes.
I can’t even imagine that that would be a good thing. Thoughts?
Give rise to the USW, the United States Web. Completely isolated from the WWW. no good.
Shut down the internet? I thought this was a joke, until I found it on several other sites (including CNET and NYTimes).
On one side, it’s not really as bad as it sounds (although it still sounds bad), since only portions deemed necessary would be shut down.
On the flip side, it would probably never work. Back in ’34, when the ‘original’ act was written, most people only had one phone line. Now many people have traditional phone, internet, and a mobile device with internet access. Combine that with the variety of ways to connect to the internet (DSL, cable, dial-up, satellite, wireless), and the ability of many sites to loose one or more servers in any given location but remain online, that would be really hard to enforce.
What happened to getting the IP address of someone doing something illegal? Why shoot the messenger (and all the people relying on the messenger)?
It does sound a lot like what China is doing.
Our government needs to keep their nose out of our internet. If national security is a concern, then the govt should have their own controlled internet (isn’t that was DARPA net was, or something like that?) that they can shut down whenever they want to feel special.
ugh.
maybe someone forgot to see the way that web 2.0 helped said relief and information towards Haiti, Iran Elections & election irregularities.
Most people on the web – while lots of porn, anti-government & hate sites abound – seem to step up for good in a time of need or crisis.
Maybe they need to throttle bandwidth TO social media instead of away from it if a crisis were to hit.
what is more scary is the fact that it an be done.
if that is true then there will be attempts by nefarious parties to find out how