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Poll: Should the US President have an Internet kill-switch?

13 points by solipsist ↗ HN
This poll was inspired by Zak's comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2150376), which connected the recent claims that the Internet has been shut off in almost all of Egypt with the emerging possibility that the US President may be given those same rights. While I don't know much about the issue, it does seem as if it is a prominent and difficult debate with both sides have solid arguments. I set up this poll to see what the HN community thought about it.

20 comments

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Locke1689
Poorly defined question. What's an "Internet kill switch?" An executive order to shut down all routable ASes in the US? Legislative?

I think this question doesn't really have an answer because it's too poorly defined.

Cushman
It's an open question, certainly, but the broad meaning isn't vague. It's anything that would legally or technologically enable the Executive branch to disable public internet access in all or part of the United States at will.

I can't think up a way to make that a plausibly good thing to exist in any form.

Locke1689
Then explain to me how this could not exist. As long as there are routable ASes they can be shut down.
abhimishra
I don't even think it needs to be a switch. The actual bill that was brought up in the Senate doesn't explicitly say 'kill switch' anywhere. In reality a call from someone in the government to a few people who work at large ISPs/backbones would be enough, since they would just comply. We saw this happen recently with Wikileaks, after all....
kbyers
It is not so easy--large networks will have a lot of redundancy built-in. Consequently, even shutting down a single large BGP autonomous system is not a simple problem and would have a lot of unintended consequences.

Wikileaks is not a good analogy. Wikileaks is more analogous to black-holing one small AS.

solipsist
> Stupid question.

Don't you think that's a little harsh to say, if not even disrespectful. As quoted from the Hacker News Guidelines (that I'm sure you must have read before):

  When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.
  E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened
  to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
This remarks adds nothing to your point and rather discredits your opinion for many of us.

> I think this question doesn't really have an answer because it's too poorly defined.

This is fair to say, but I left it broad for a reason - hoping people would debate the general principle rather than specific details. If the broadness of the poll is too much for you, then ignore it.

Locke1689
Perhaps that was too harsh. I changed it to "poorly defined question," which is critical but helpful.
gregpilling
I am not tech enough to know, but could an ad-hoc network be created from people's wifi connections that could get around an internet backbone shutdown? At least it should work to connect people within urban areas, I would think.
TillE
Sure. There are a few local projects along these lines, with limited success. See freifunk.net, for example. The main problem is that the range of WiFi is quite short even in denser urban areas (so you wind up with lots of fragmented micro-networks), and it requires significant effort from each participant to set up. If Fon started making this an optional feature on their routers, it could get really interesting.

Or maybe just a way of connecting Android phones into a local communication network.

Does anyone know if there's some formal spec for this kind of mesh network?

shantanubala
That's like asking, "should the United States have free speech?" But it also has other implications as well. If our enemies have networks, and ours our disabled, how in the world are we going to "win"? How do you even "win" a "cyber war"?

You can prevent "cyber warfare" by disconnecting sensitive stuff. You don't need to kill Wikipedia or my blog because there's not much warfare you can really wage with pages that aren't sensitive in nature. How is an enemy going to abuse Remember The Milk or Reddit to the extent that it cripples our national security? So a kill switch is not only stupidly impractical because it makes us more disorganized and disconnected than an enemy, but also because it's strictly unconstitutional.

A better question: is there a sane justification for it?

DjDarkman
We have to stop the evil enemy from posting false information to wikipedia and evil comments to your blog. :D
brown9-2
I'm not sure what you hope to learn with this poll. The first few Google results for "internet kill switch" are all news media articles which explain the proposed law pretty clearly.
solipsist
Simple. I want to hear your opinions and interpretations on the idea. The raw facts are something I can find from sites that Google brings up (like you said). Opinions and facts are two different things that each have their own importance.
jdp23
Early returns are pretty overwhelming.

Just curious: of the 98%-+ who are against the kill-switch, how many of you will be willing to help if there are some activism campaigns?

nano81
I would think that considering the audience here, it's quite obvious that the voting will be overwhelmingly for "no", making the poll pretty pointless. You're asking a group of people who largely make their living thanks to the internet in some way whether the government should have the ability to turn it off whenever they feel like it. The answer will unsurprisingly be no.
solipsist 

   "Sixty-one percent of Americans said the President should have the
    ability to shut down portions of the Internet in the event of a
    coordinated malicious cyber attack, according to research by Unisys." [1]
While the definition of a kill-switch is broad and may have confused some voters, it is very evident that the hacker community has different (and most likely more informed) views on the issue than the average American. Compared to the 61% of Americans, less than 1% of HN users support the bill (as of when this comment was posted).

Those who consider this poll pointless because they think the idea of a kill-switch is obviously impractical are ignoring the reality. They are being ignorant of the fact that there exists a debate on the topic, even if it seems trivial to themselves.

[1] - http://www.geekosystem.com/internet-kill-switch-poll/

cema
Well, of course on HN the answer will be overwhelmingly "no". What is interesting (to me) is the rationale behind the few "yes" answers: might be instructive. Anyone care to expound? Thanks!
protomyth
I should amend my "No" vote with the idea that the government should have a switch to remove itself from the public network. Also, I would hope that nothing that controls missiles, ships, etc. is connected to the internet at all.