Shutting Off the Internet

sitting across from me is senior writer Jonathan Strickland. Change the scheme, al to the mood, electrify the boys and girls, if you'd be so kind, all right, then I have to say he's got the presentation down at least I think so. Thank you. You can't see it, so there was a lot of arm gestures in there that was there's a little there's a little flailing, um. But I was not. I was not all lit up for that particular quote. So if you know where that quote comes from,

you know why I said that. But we're gonna talk about something actually a little serious, actually quite a bit serious today, um, something that has been in the news recently at the time of the recording of this podcast, which is very early February two eleven, and that is the idea of an Internet kill switch, some sort of ability for a person or government or organization to shut down the Internet or at least are access to the Internet right now. What spurred this was the events in

Egypt that are going on. As Jonathan and I are actually recording this. Um, I'm sure by the time you are will be listening to this, the the fallout will still be uh relevant to what's going on. Sure, but one of the things if you are not paying attention to current events in the world right now, you may be unaware that there have been in late January and early February two thousand eleven, series of protests by people who have have been asking the Egyptian president Hostni Mubarak

to step down from office. Um. He he has as of this point been in office for more than thirty years, I believe, took office after the president Onwar Sadat was assassinated, which I remember from my grade school days. Um so um. You know, he may be saying, what does this have

to do with technology? Well, in an order in order to prevent uh the ability of people who are protesting the governments really really protesting and asking Mubarak to step down from organizing using Internet based tools such as social networking sites Twitter, Facebook, etcetera. Um, the Egyptian government basically shut off access to the internet, um two people within

the country. Now there was one network that stayed up a little longer um than the rest I believe it was the NOR group was able to uh provide Internet access a little bit after that, but they eventually went dark as well, and the the the Internet was down for about five days within within Egypt. UM. And UH. The reason this is uh, the reason this is valid

to many of us who are listening in the United States. UM, it had been proposed I guess really two thousand ten, the possibility that to prevent uh cyber attacks on certain infrastructure electronic infrastructure in the United States, that the President of the United States would be given the ability to shut down parts of the Internet within the company the country. Theoretically. Now the question is can that really be done? Right?

So let's let's clear up a couple of things, because obviously the case in Egypt got a lot of people worried because the thought was, well, what if our government, what if the United States government? Of course, Chris and I are in the United States, so that's why when I say our government, I'm talking about them. Uh. What if what if the government for some reason wanted to

try and suppress civilian communication. Uh, would this give them give the government the power, specifically the president, the power to to make communication lines go dark? And it You know, it's a scary thought because so much of what we do now depends upon the Internet in one way or another. It may not even directly depend on it, but indirectly it will. And so people have gotten really sensitive about

the subject. Uh. The government, for its part, has said that a lot of the fear is based upon misinterpretations of the The proposed act, which is called the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act. It was introduced by Joseph Lieberman. Yes, and it was introduced originally in June of It has since undergone revisions which somewhat define some of the terms to a greater extent because the original

act had some loose language that definitely had people scared. Yeah, But like Chris was saying, that the intent of the Act, at least as it is worded, is not to you be able to manipulate the Internet in order to hamper communication among citizens or to infringe upon First Amendment rights. It is, as he was saying, to protect our infrastructure

in the case of a cyber attack, right. I think people have interpreted that to mean that, uh, citizens living within the United States would not be able to access the Internet at all anymore. And I think the if I have read the Act correctly, what the uh the intent is actually to shut down links to certain infrastructure items from the Internet. So wouldn't keep people off the Internet.

It would say, if you had an electric you know, electric station that were connected to the Internet, it would shut access off between the electric and the electric generating station and the Internet so that it could not be reached. UM that way, now, I mean, that's that's the way

I've I've read it as a matter of fact. Um. UH. Senator Lieberman and ranking Member Susan Collins and Senator Tom Carper actually released a statement on February first about, uh, you know, drawing the parallel between the situation in Egypt and this act, and they denounced the the Mubart government's actions in shutting down all Internet communications in Egypt UM and attempted to clarify on that and for for instance, they mentioned that the Communications Act of four UM does

give the president some control over radio communications providers, wire providers, the wire people don't use it that way. But yeah, yeah, that Their point was that the that act um Act was would give the president such broad powers as to in effect allow the president to do what we're talking about right now is control or shut down sections of the Internet, um under certain situations and so communications channels, right, and and part of that depends upon you interpreting the

Act to extend to Internet communication. I mean, it's it's not as clearly when the when it was written in it was not about the Internet, right, I mean, it was about telegraphs and telephone lines mainly. UM. The to to to extend it to the Internet now would require a little bit of interpretation, and I'm sure you would have people challenging saying this goes beyond the intent of the original Act. But intent and letter sometimes get a

little muddied in these situations. So Lieberman's point was that the the Asset Act was really to to define the limitations and the specific situations in which the president could use this power, as opposed to one which was much more broad. Yes, specifically the bill, at least according to the statement in the clarification that was speaking of just

a moment ago um. They they issued a series of clarifications, one being that it supposed to be the most critical assets available to the Internet, including infrastructure to run the country and the economy. Also, it has to be I'm sering no, no, I was gonna say, I actually have the definition for that because it comes from the US Patriot Act. The critical infrastructure is defined in this UH way.

It says the term critical infrastructure means systems and assets, whether physical or virtual, so vital to the United States that the incapacity or destruction of such systems and assets would have a debilitating impact on security, national economic security,

national public health, or safety, or any combination of those matters. Now, UH, the the Asset Act that Lieberman introduced further defines it and actually adds in some stuff that made some people nervous, including UH information providers, which could essentially be I s s um he he went on in the state meant to say that it would require the president to if there was an ongoing or imminent attack that's a quote,

um that could cause national or regional catastrophic events. That's the kind of thing that would have to be going on for the President to use this power. And UH he or she the president UM in this case President Obama, but whomever after later on down the road, assuming this stays in in place, would have to use the least

disruptive means feasible again a quote UM. They would have to notify Congress UM and wouldn't be able to be continued for more than a hundred twenty days without approval from Congress thirty day blocks up to a hundred twenty days, and then at that point you must have Congressional approval

to continue it. And the bill also they, according to statement UH, specifically forbids actions that would violate the First Amendment and would not prevent in net traffic, email, and other forms of communication unless they're involved with critical infrastructure. So if you were you were I am ing a friend on you know, a social typical social network that would not be considered critical infrastructure, you should theoretically um

be able to continue to do that. Yeah, you should still be able to use things like Facebook or Twitter to to organize groups and to you know, do whatever it is you want to do to have those those peaceable uh public gatherings, that kind of thing. The another element I remember reading about was that when we're telling critical infrastructure that The example they use was Hoover Dam. Yes, right, yes, but yeah, that's what we're really talking about. What we're

talking about critical infrastructure. We're talking about things like power grids, water supply, water supply, nuclear power plants, the military infrasture, military infrastructures, Yes, stuff that were it to be compromised, would mean a terrible, terrible outcome for the citizens in

the United States of America. Right, I assume they o. Also when they mentioned economy, we're talking about things like Wall Street, the stock exchanges and things like that, they would want to be careful to protect that infrastructure as well. And if we apply a little critical thinking to this situation and really think about, you know, is is this is what the government is telling us? Is that really what they mean? Like, in other words, does it really

you know? Because of course we should be skeptical, we should question our government, but not blindingly, right, we shouldn't just assume that what they're telling us is a fib but we should definitely look into it, look into it, right, And so part of the looking into it means, all, right, well, do what do I believe that the government would not abuse this power in such a way to somehow like

let's say let's say the wiki leaks. Sure, let's say that the government is as, hey, you know what wiki leaks is, uh is creating a true danger to national security. So what we're going to do is now command all I s I s p s in the United States to block wiki leaks so that people in the United States can no longer access it. That's that's something that

people were worried about. Well, under this Act, at least in theory, you would not be able to do that unless there were a real perceived threat, like an actual cybersecurity attack going on that involved wiki leaks in some way. Otherwise you would not be allowed to just tell all the ice pas to block it. That doesn't mean that an I s P couldn't choose to block it, right, I mean they can because those are private companies. Right.

One of the criticisms I've seen of this had nothing to do with, um the the potential violation of First Amendment rights. It had more to do with why is it the government telling private businesses how to protect themselves when private businesses are decades ahead of the government as far as cybersecurity is concerned, Which that that's a viable question.

I mean, you know, the the the kind of extreme case that I've seen is saying, how can the lawyers and the politicians who are part of homeland security, who have no experience in I T security at all, how can they expect to improve our practices? When we do this for a living. This is how we build our business, this is how we provide our services. We know how to do this. How is someone else who has no experience in this going to help? That's a that's a

legitimate question. You could ask, well, why does the president need this power in the first place? Because let's say that you are an engineer at Hoover Dawn and you detect that there is some sort of cyber intruder or a threat to the infrastructure, the computer infrastructure at Hoover down. There's a a good chance that engineer is going to say, you know what, we need to shut this down. We have to close off our our our ports portals to the outside world as far as the virtual port portals

are concerned, and and take care of this problem. Why is there a need for a government intervention? And that's a good question to ask, you know, that's that's probably a more appropriate question to ask rather than is the government going to shut down Facebook, because that's less likely to happen. And I think that again, when you think about this critically, the government taking strides to say shut

down the Internet. Let's let's take the most extreme case that the government for some reason has decided to shut down our access to the Internet so that no one in the United States can now get on any sort of Internet service. UM, there would be chaos and there would be there. You would not solve it problems that way, right, right, that would just create even more anger and distrust in

the public. I don't I can't imagine any sane government official saying this is a good idea, because there's very little chance that a positive outcome will will happen as a result of it, right, And I think I think to some degree, we've seen that in what happened in Egypt. UM. Not only that, but people in Egypt found unique ways to continue getting their message across UM. I was doing some reading in preparation for the podcast about some of the things that they were doing. UM. You know, they

were using. They were initially using the tools that that so many of us use, different messaging UM and social networking tools. But when the Internet blockage came down. UM. As a matter of fact, I was reading on our recaled by Ellen or Mills who wrote that on in January twenty six, one of the c net writers and UM. She said that people were using you know, regular phones, fax machines, Ham radio. Remember we did our our podcast

on on Ham Radio sometime ago. Now, UM, you know, even dial up modem usage started to go up again, so so people had had access to those tools. UM. You know, they didn't shut down the phone networks, just the Internet, at least I didn't read anything that indicated that they shut down the traditional phone networks. And in addition, Google on Twitter UM started a service for posting tweets

without an Internet connection. Basically, uh speak to tweet allowed people to say what they wanted to say, and it would it would transfer it to a Twitter message with the hashtag Egypt added on to the end of it. So it you know, outside organizations were actually helping protesters get the word out. So I mean, I think it would be very difficult UM to shut it down completely.

And in some cases too, I believe they were using mash networks UM, which I can't remember if we've ever mentioned that on the podcast, but we definitely need to do something on that because I think it's really cool. One laptop per child also uses mash networks. Um, they're sort of ad hoc UH networks, usually wireless networks, if I'm not mistaken. UM, and uh, they don't use the typical infrastructure on a lot of cases, places like well in places where they use the one laptop per child

uh product. Um, we're talking about places that don't have that infrastructure in place. They don't have hard wired phone lines and cable connections. UM, so they use these local networks, local internet network networks that aren't actually connect to the Internet, but they are a small wireless network. UM. I shouldn't have used internet in net case it. But yeah, I mean people would were communicating using those as well. So I don't think even if the government shut everything down,

I don't think it would the traditional infrastructure. I don't think it would take long before people found new ways to get in touch with one another, especially considering the tools we've been given. And further another point, I would I would suggest that says the government would be very uh reticent to to take such an extreme action as to shut down the Internet. So you've already got the one case where you know you would infuriate your citizens

and you don't really want to do that. There's really yeah, how would you make things better after that? Right, especially if ostensibly your goal is eventually to come out of this with a peaceful resolution, you would you would essentially end up losing the trust of the citizens and in a representative government, that means that your government is no longer valid if the citizens no longer trust in the

government that represents them. Um. You know, assuming that you continue to be a democracy, that pretty much means you have guaranteed you are out the door, um as soon as possible, in fact, probably before even elections would roll around. So that's one part. But another part is the fact that so many businesses rely upon the Internet, particularly in the United States, but all around the world. And of course, you know, the Internet has made the world a you know,

a global a true global economy. So you've got businesses that are centered in America that would be deeply affected. But you've got businesses in other countries as well that have interests in America, they have um, they have infrastructure in America that would be very much affected by the Internet being shut down within the borders of the United States of America. You're talking about losing billions of dollars

worth of revenue and and doing intense economic damage. In fact, one might be able to argue that shutting down the Internet would cause more damage economically than if you had let the Internet stay up right like that, you know, one of the guidelines to this act is that you would only invoke it if there were an imminent threat to national economic security. Well, if you were to shut

down the whole Internet, you would create that threat. Actually, So that's the other reason I don't think it's very

likely to happen in the United States. That doesn't mean that we wouldn't see this act UH put into place, or even take an advantage of It's just that I think we would be more likely to see it the way that we're told it's intended, right, so that if there were a concentrated attacks, say on the Pentagon, that the President would have the authority to tell Pentagon officials, all right, close off all routes to the Internet until we resolve this. Again, you could argue, why does this

even need to be a presidential thing? But you could also argue, while there, what if you have some company that is or or some person, some organization there's in some way UH partnering with these attacks that you know, maybe it's not that they're the victim, but are rather a conspirator, you know, a co conspirator. Well, in that case, you do have to maybe rely on a higher authority than just the company head to take UH, to take take control of the situation and to to try and

limit whatever harm could come of it. Um. It's still scary. Yeah, you know, you see, we've seen this happen before, not just in Egypt, we also in Iran. We saw it um a couple of years ago where there were the Iranian protests. Also a lot of people were trying to um UH organized through Twitter and Facebook, and we saw that the Iranian government tried to UM confuse the issue as much as possible, or at least those are the allegations, right.

I mean, it's hard for me to say, I don't I can't understand the language, so I have to rely upon the reports I'm seeing, and some of the reports were not necessarily the most unbiased, so it's hard for me to draw my conclusions. But that's based upon the information that I encountered. Yeah, it's um, it definitely shows how dependent we are on the Internet for all kinds

of things. The the outcry over something like this would not have been nearly as serious in say, as it is now because so many people are are you know, used the Internet for communication, keeping up with friends and family um and uh and for commerce um that you know, we've we've come to expect that it's you know, I've actually heard the the the idea thrown out in the last few days that Internet access may be considered a human right, which is a wow, that's that's sort of

a topic for another podcast really, but you know, I again, I don't think this would have even been considered a few years ago. And now the idea that you might have a right to access this you know, amazing communications tool that we all use now. Um. You know it's funny because I wouldn't have necessarily thought of that just a few years ago, but now so many people are relying on it that that it is a reasonable debate to have whether or not it's a um, a human

right to have that kind of access. But these tools have also made it possible for protesters and demonstrators, whether they are peaceful or violent, organize in ways that they had haven't been before. So it's scary for governments too. I mean, the Iranian government had a hard time because the mobs or it wasn't it wasn't an Iran, it was where it was Belarus. That was even before that, where mobs would gather by text message they would say okay, be at the square at twelve oh seven. It was

a flash mob. It was a flash mob. People would show up, they would start to protest, the authorities would come to crack them, crack down on them, and they would have already disseminated the location of the next gathering. So by the time that the authorities converged on the area, they were gone. The protesters had gone, They had converged on a new area, and they were they were able to stay one or maybe even five steps of the

authorities by using these tools. It makes sense that a government would want to be able to do that in those instances. So that I think two is why it seems scary, because people go, yeah, you know what, they might want to do that, and what if they do it to me. I don't want that to happen. Yeah, we we've seen the president, which is what makes it scary. But you see, I could see the other side why they would want to. Certainly, it is definitely a scary threat.

It's one of those that the more you think about, the more you realize it's less likely to have in the United States. Now, I will never say it's impossible. No,

I don't think it's impossible anywhere it would be. It would be monumentally surprising to me if it did happen the United States, simply for the reasons I stated before, which is that I think essentially you would have to have a president who was saying, you know what we're I'm just I'm going to discard the entire American system of government for this to work, because otherwise, you're, like I said, you're gonna end up voting everyone out as

soon as possible if you felt like you've been betrayed. Right, So, in a democracy, this kind of approach doesn't really work. If you want to read the bill, it's actually available online. Um it is four and ten pages long. Yeah, the first hundred pages of that have been struck through. I do think that, um, yeah, I think that in light of recent events in Egypt and some of the other countries in the Middle East, where I mean that the Tunisian UH protests I think have sort of helped uh

some momentum in that regard. I think that it may cause people to give this bill another look, either you know, go through and revise it again or strike it down and start over from scratch. But UM, I I think it's one of those things where an actual real life event or series of events may add some perspective. Yeah, if you want to read it, it's uh, it's s

period three for eight zero. That is the number associated with this particular act um and it's a it's long, you know, and it's and it's full of legal ease because I mean it's you know, you gotta remember, we got lawyers running this country, so that'll happen at any rate. But it's it's good to actually be aware of what's happening. And like Chris said, there have been a UM there's actually been a couple of documents that have come out trying to um clear up matters about this act and

what is covered versus what isn't covered. Uh, you were talking about one that was released in February. Correct. Yes, the one I have it was actually released back in in June of it's called myth versus Reality exactly. They keep having to clear up a lot of the issues.

I'm sure they use a lot of the same verbiage because it's the same questions over and over, I'm sure, and that I mean, it's a very emotionally charged topic, so it's understandable, yes, and yeah, whether whether or not you necessarily feel that having access to the Internet as a human right, you can. It's hard to deny that it's a seriously emotional issue. People want at least they want access to the internet, is not need access to

the Internet. So it's definitely something that's going to concern people. And I wanted to add if I may, if you're looking for this UH, you'll have an easy time finding and if you go to the Library of Congress is UM website, you can also look for all kinds of UM legislation United States legislation. It's called Thomas UH in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson goes the the quote at the top of the page, but it's UM. You know,

HTTP call and slash last. There's no WS here, so it's just Thomas th H O M A S dot l o C. That's Library of Congress dot gov, Thomas dot l oc, dot GOVN you can look up the status of different bills. You could see which legislators have introduced what legislation. It's actually a pretty interesting tool. It's very very useful. Uh. And it's an easy way to track this one down if you're interested in doing it.

Eve unless the top five weekly pieces of legislation people you're looking up, and I would imagine that this one is one of them. Yeah, I'm sure we'll ranked pretty high up there. But this week, let's let's conclude just by saying, remember, according to the Act, this isn't about shutting off the Internet. It's about protecting various parts of the infrastructure from cyber attacks. Uh. It's debatable about whether or not that could be extended to the point that

it would affect all Americans across the United States. Uh. So, I mean, I'm not saying that those worries are completely unfounded. I'm just saying that I think it unlikely to see that scenario happen, right right, And I think now that it's become something more in the public eye, people are going to take note and you'll see people writing their legislators and saying, you know, what is going on with

this bill. So I think it'll probably be in the news and we'll be seeing more clarification or movement on it. Thirty page version of the Act to read next time we talk about this, Yes, because that's the way we work. So if you guys have any opinions, I'm sure are a lot of you have opinions on this subject, I have no doubt. Please let us know. You can let us know on Facebook and Twitter are handled. There is tech Stuff h s W. Or you can send us

an email. That address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com and Chris and I will talk to you again, assuming the government lets us really soon, all right. For moral nos and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. So learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The How Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you