Proverbs for paranoids: If they can catch you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.
— T. Pynchon
Indulge me here while I get a little paranoid and venture into a realm where it’s easy to get dismissed as a nutcase. And I’ll say this upfront: I really don’t know how much I ought to worry about this.
But: The Egyptian government just tried to decapitate the protests in the streets by shutting down the Internet, and it was relatively easy; four ISPs threw the switches at government command, and bingo — no more email or websites talking about how to toss the bums out. John Weber at the Bay Citizen (who is neither a nutcase nor a paranoid) says this is a first (although China and other countries have censored internet traffic and limited use, this is different; it’s a total sudden shutdown of what was an open service).
So it’s worth asking, anyway: Could that happen in other countries, including ours?
Well, you don’t have to be way out in loony land to be worried about the Lieberman Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act. Yes, I realize all the talk of an Internet Kill Switch sounds batty. We talked about this today on sfbg radio, and Johnny told me I was way wacko: the Internet is so essential to commerce in this country that the corporate powers that be would never allow it to be throttled. Tens of billions of dollars would be lost in moments; the stock market and the banking system couldn’t function.
But the scary thing is that it wouldn’t be all the difficult. All you’d have to do is cut off the domain name servers and nobody could find anything. (Yeah, you can bypass that with website numbers — IP addresses — but most people don’t have those handy.) And one company, Sprint (I think) owns most of the switches that direct all the traffic in this country; shut them off and every city would be isolated.
The web was designed to be redundant; a natural (or unnatural) disaster in New York or Chicago wouldn’t cripple Internet traffic around the country. And I’m not saying that Obama (or his successors) would ever actually try to squelch protest in the U.S. by taking such a drastic step.
But the fact remains that technically, it wouldn’t be that hard to do what Egypt did, and shut things down for a while. And since so much of our political communication in this country is based on the web, it seems somehow that our ability to talk to each other in times of crisis is a wee bit fragile.
Or am I out of my mind here? It wouldn’t be the first time.