Kill bill for the internet

After the events in Egypt a closer look might be taken at proposed US Senate legislation called the internet kill bill. Senators Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Tom Carper (D-DE) have co-sponsored a bill(introduced in 2010) that might give the President the power to disconnect the internet. It is unclear if the President might already have this power under decade’s old legislation passed after Pearl Harbor.

Whether killing the internet is even possible is still debatable. However by reconfiguring network routers and making it difficult for them to reach IP addresses the Egyptian government effectively did to some degree kill their internet. Not quite a kill switch but a kill system that disrupted communications between those organizing and participating in anti-gov protests.

In a statement after the events in Egypt Senators Lieberman, Collins, and Carper released a statement defending the bill saying in part
“they will ensure that any legislation that moves in this Congress contains explicit language prohibiting the President from doing what President Mubarak did.” However Sen. Lieberman’s earlier statements offer little similar reassurance. This is from a 2010 interview where he claims critics are spreading “total misinformation” about the bill while using a less than comforting example to describe the law's function “We need the capacity for the president to say, Internet service provider, we’ve got to disconnect the American Internet from all traffic coming in from another foreign country… Right now, China, the government, can disconnect parts of its Internet in a case of war. We need to have that here, too."

The internet kill bill joins so much other senate legislation good, bad and ugly that is stalled in the Senate. It may also be broken into bite sized pieces and added to spending bills. Many of the barriers are turf battles about which groups (DHS or military?) should have authority over civilian cyber security rather than issues of personal freedom and rights. US, county and local government IT officials express caution about problems an internet shutdown might cause. Law enforcement relies heavily information flowing from the internet and would have to rely on radio during a shutdown. Also some municipalities have emergency management on twitter feeds.