Federal Govt to Police the Internet.... ?

[samUwell]

Bill would give President emergency control over the internet

Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.

They’re not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.

The new version would allow the president to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” relating to “non-governmental” computer networks and do what’s necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for “cybersecurity professionals,” and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.

its only a matter of time until the new Dictator appoints a “Internet Czar” to being policing forums, blogs and other sites to give equal opportunity to all sides. This has me sick to my stomach.

[billott1]

According to the past presidents: We have had an ongoing, I guess the ending is TBD, emergency over terrorism. So it will be easy to make one up for Cyber stuff and then it is tax and regulate away.

[liberty_student]

The world is bigger than America. By the time America starts aggressively regulating the net, it will no longer be an economic or political superpower.

[filc]

@samUwell

its only a matter of time until the new Dictator appoints a “Internet Czar” to being policing forums, blogs and other sites to give equal opportunity to all sides. This has me sick to my stomach.

Being in IT and seeing how easy it is to get around this here are the reasons why I think internet governance will fail.

Big Brother watching your traffic

Private business’s alreayd employ a protocol called VPN tunnels which encrypt the transfer of data through the internet. Not even the ISP can peak inside of these packets and see whats going on. This completly undermines the ability of any ISP to truely snoop on your activity.

Taking it one step further, it’s entirely feasible and easily possible for a voluntary community to come together and build an encrypted INTRANET completly internal to the known internet. Internal virtual routers would only route encrypted data. All the government would see are a series of nodes sending out encrypted IP packets.

Additionally, consumer grade routers and products are starting to be shipped with these tools. On top of that, assuming the government bans the use of these protocols you have an entire open-source community that offers platforms to accomplish these things completly free online.

IPSEC SSL-VPN GRE Tunnel

Blocking Consumer\Indinvidual Access

I have heard the argument that the government could restrict your access should you refuse to comply to their standards. Standards which will give them the ability to monitor your data transfer

This is easily refutable with ad-hoc networks. This has already happened in practice where general internet connectivity is limited. Then you could use your encryption technologies to encapsulate your IP packets so that GOV operatives would not be able to snoop in on your communities network without extorting that info from one of your members.

Honestly the government is shooting to high on this one. It’s a clear representation of how aarogant they are.