Kill Switch our DL Classes and Freedom of Speech

Has anyone read that Senators Lieberman, Collins, and Carper are calling for Obama to have access to an Internet "Kill Switch" that he could use to shut down the web? This is supposedly only for security measures, but can you imagine what that would do to online DL? Talk about big brother taking control. What's your opinion?

Obama's Internet Kill Switch: Good Idea or Step Too Far? | The Atlantic Wire

 

How do you do that? At the most he can stop all Internet to and from USA. But with so many of the major sites being load balanced across the world, how effective will Kill Switch be? At most it will destroy USA Internet communications and that's about all. Fighting cyber attacks with Kill Switch seems to be chopping of your hand because it has a mosquito bite. Crazy proposal!

 

Good analogy. It might also be like making yourself blind in hopes that your enemy will be blinded too. I can see a scenario where they perceive a threat, shut down the Internet and disrupt all of the other business that takes place online, such as DL. Supposedly they want to pass a law that requires ISP's to create a technology that will allow the White House to shut down the web.

 

Interesting, because the federal government here in Australia has some grand plans to censor the internet. While almost everyone would agree about stopping access to child pornography, snuff movies etc there are real doubts about whether it can be done and if the plans are just the thin edge of the wedge. Our government is formed by the Labor Party which is generally regarded as a little more leftish than the opposition and often has quite a few civil libertarians in it who you would expect to be dubious about censorship. Australia had pretty strict censorship until the late 1960s. Queensland had its own separate film censorship much later.

Actually, there hasn't been much about the plan recently. The way polling is at the moment, the government probably won't be with us much longer.

 

Well, the only thing that is constant in the world is change . Lets see what the new govt can do. But Internet still remains prohibitively expensive.

 

If they were hell-bent on shutting down the internet, I wonder how they'd be able to do that given the bulk of cell phones now have internet access. Wonder if in effect, they'd be shutting down cell phone service too?

That would be a huge law of unintended consequences that could make a bad situation worse.