Thread: "Shutting down the Internet in Case of an Emergency"

Just an interesting article about how the internet can be "shut down"....

http://www.metro.co.uk/news/836210-b...k-the-internet

It turns out that large parts of the internet can be shut down "in case of an emergency" and that some people have the powers to do this, being:

Dan Kaminsky of the US; Jiankang Yao from China; Moussa Guebre of Burkina Faso; Bevil Wooding from Trinidad and Tobago; Ondrej Sury of the Czech Republic; and Norm Ritchie of Canada.

Interesting choice of countries represented..

Controllers of most major servers have joined the scheme and others are expected to follow. An international emergency or hacking attack could prompt DNSSEC to stop connections to all these ‘signed’ sites.
The keyholders would be called to a US base to oversee a reboot of the security system, which includes creating new keys

Does anyone know how something like this would work technically?

I doubt this could control the entire internet. But the internet could certainly be severely restricted if key hubs in certain locations were switched off.

And what constitutes a "major emergency" and why would anyone want to "turn off" the internet?
Has anyone read about this story elsewhere?

Do you think it should be possible to "shut down the internet" and if so, who should have the right to do it?

Read about it here. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/0 ... ky-on-how/

That was two years ago. I expect the problem has been fixed by now.

Interesting!
Didn't know about that, saw the story for the first time yesterday in the paper, so I thought it was the latest news.

Still an interesting question though.
And in case of a "worldwide emergency" assuming the electricity still works, I'd like to have internet access.

Technically, you can 'shut down the internet'. Well, you can cut it off from the rest of the world. There are physical backbone lines that run across borders. If you shut them down then no query will cross the border since there would be no physical links. The same can be done with satellite channels. If you look at the Internet backbone topology graphs you'll see that there isn't all that many links go in or out of any given country (with the possible exception of US).

This is not new news to anyone who actually pays attention to what is happening in the world.
Haven't you heard all the commotion about the "Obama internet kill switch" that is being pushed through by your Marxist jerkwad "hero", Obama, just recently?

The internet is being systematically controlled and filtered all around the world. Individual rights of expression, speech and self defense are being eroded every day and the good little people are saying and doing nothing to stop it!

Shutting down youtube in Case of extremism

Центральный районный суд Комсомольска-на-Амуре предписал местному интернет-провайдеру "Роснет" заблокировать для абонентов доступ к пяти веб-сайтам, на которых был обнаружен экстремистский контент. В список запрещенных интернет-ресурсов попали видеохостинг YouTube, интернет-архив web.archive.org, электронная библиотека lib.rus.ec, а также thelib.ru и zhurnal.ru.

http://www.rg.ru/2010/07/28/zapret-site-anons.html

Это вообще полнейший бред.
Запретить ютьюб только на одном провайдере. Даже не знаю, плакать или смеяться. Кстати, представиитель провайдера заявил, что они уже обжаловали это решение, и в законную силу оно не вступило.

Yes, that internet service provider (ISP) in Komsomolsk na Amur are wasting their time! If someone who is a customer of theirs wants to get onto Youtube, they can do it using a proxy service, or using a VPN.

But I think the Internet is REALLY important for understanding what goes on in the world. I would hate if it got restricted, commercialised or monitored.

On the internet you can find out "the real story" about things if you have a bit of time to spend on it.
So much of what is in the papers is:

* Motivated by a political agenda; national, economic or both.
* 'Politically correct' nonsense -- following the latest PC view on certain issues...
* Just irrelevant sensationalist stories about extreme violence sex scandals or people doing stupid things.
* False information or misleading statistics.

ETC.

Meanwhile important news are ignored or not represented correctly.

There is a big scandal going on in Sweden right now, which is very complicated. It is to do with the Defense saying that they have the right to listen in on ALL internet traffic passing through Sweden, for anti-terrorist related reasons. (ridiculous!) A law was passed to confirm this, which 90% of the population say they opposed.

This would let them spy on the internet traffic of lots of nearby countries, including 80% of Russia's internet traffic, which apparently goes through Sweden. Sweden is not in NATO and would not share the info with anyone IN THEORY..... In reality, I can imagine how this would pan out..

Fortunately all the ISPs and the everyone who understands computing is against this idea. Because the ISPs are not co-operating at all, the government/defense are having trouble implementing the law.

Byt what kind of democracy are we supposed to be when a crucial decision gets taken that 90% of the population is against!? There is no actual terrorist threat against Sweden, so the idea to spy for that reason is proposterous.

Since newspapers are largely rubbish (with some exceptions of course) it's so important to have unreststricted and unmonitored internet access. Anything that goes against that is bad in my view.

Originally Posted by Hanna

...to listen in on ALL internet traffic passing through Sweden, for anti-terrorist related reasons...

lol I wonder, how are they supposing to perform this task, even if they are planning to hire the entire Swedish population to do that, considering the huge amount of internet traffic that goes through Sweden.

Probably only looking for key words, phrases, by machine, high speed. Also 'activity' , certain specific sites, etc. Only if key words etc found do they look at data more closely.

Originally Posted by Ramil

Это вообще полнейший бред.
Запретить ютьюб только на одном провайдере. Даже не знаю, плакать или смеяться. Кстати, представиитель провайдера заявил, что они уже обжаловали это решение, и в законную силу оно не вступило.

Гугл выразил обеспокоенность и сказал что на youtube есть канал Президента РФ. Можно и плакать и смеяться, но это наша система. Не исключено, что запретят как в Китае. Уж больно им статься уголовная эта про экстремизм нравится. Такой статьей можно любой запрет оправдать. И кого угодно за решетку бросить.

Originally Posted by Seraph

Probably only looking for key words, phrases, by machine, high speed. Also 'activity' , certain specific sites, etc. Only if key words etc found do they look at data more closely.

I understand that of course, just kidding. Still, this initiative sounds too ridiculous.

Originally Posted by mishau_

Гугл выразил обеспокоенность и сказал что на youtube есть канал Президента РФ.

Мне, кстати, это в первую очередь пришло в голову, когда я усышал про этот идиотский запрет. Интересно, знал ли судья, когда выносил решение, что запрещает в том числе и официальный канал президента на тюбике?

Originally Posted by Hanna

There is a big scandal going on in Sweden right now, which is very complicated. It is to do with the Defense saying that they have the right to listen in on ALL internet traffic passing through Sweden, for anti-terrorist related reasons. (ridiculous!) A law was passed to confirm this, which 90% of the population say they opposed. ...

How do they handle the encrypted voip? skype? Is skype 'cooperating' with authorities? And other encrypted stuff? Maybe this why Hanna and Basil said is ridiculous. I didn't think about that, I'm not an IT person, these don't come automatic to me.

Supposedly they have SOME clue how they propose to do it.

Apparently "Kommersant" and some other Russian papers have written a fair bit about this. I found this:
http://www.kommersant.ru/doc.aspx?DocsID=906926

The situation came about by chance, just because Sweden was one of the very first countries to put fast cabling in place, through the old state owned telecom provider. For that reason, just because of convenience, the internet traffic from nearby countries ended up going through Sweden.

The situation with privacy in Sweden is really terrible; basically the state knows everything about everyone thanks to the system with ID numbers. Most of the state registers are public info, so other people can check it too. This law is an example of the low level of privacy which is really very irritating. I hate that they know so much about me!! The UK is the opposite to that. It hasn't got a clue what normal people are doing....

Originally Posted by Hanna

http://www.kommersant.ru/doc.aspx?DocsID=906926

It says that this law supposed to start working from the 1 Jan 2009! Hanna, thanks for the warning! I didn't know about that.

I will be more careful from now on. Gosh, I almost have send via e-mail the sacred family recipe for vodka that I give to my pet bear!

http://habrahabr.ru/blogs/telecom/65924/

Не поленитесь помимо статьи почитать также и комментарии.

Originally Posted by Basil77

I will be more careful from now on. Gosh, I almost have send via e-mail the sacred family recipe for vodka that I give to my pet bear!

That's exactly the sort of thing that the Swedish defense MUST know about.

You could try encrypting it though....
Apparently the same defense organisation that is doing the monitoring has applied for a higher budget to increase their ability to de-crypt encrypted messages that they intercept. But their request has not yet been approved. They are concerned that the "terrorists" who they are spying on are using encryption that they can't crack....

Actually, if they care so much about terrorism, then they should kick this terrible site out of Sweden: http://www.kavkazcenter.com -- a site that is giving out info from Caucasus terrorists! It's hosted at the same privacy oriented data centre that Pirate Bay was on. But Pirate Bay was kicked out and is now hosted in Ukraine! And this site is allowed to remain, despite Russia asking that it should be shut down. Maybe they are monitoring it though; who knows.

Originally Posted by DDT

This is not new news to anyone who actually pays attention to what is happening in the world.
Haven't you heard all the commotion about the "Obama internet kill switch" that is being pushed through by your Marxist jerkwad "hero", Obama, just recently?

The internet is being systematically controlled and filtered all around the world. Individual rights of expression, speech and self defense are being eroded every day and the good little people are saying and doing nothing to stop it!

lol, more sarcasm?