The 'Internet Kill Switch'?

Egyptian authorities disconnected the entire country from the Internet during the current revolution. This is a clear sign that the worldwide network is seen as an important enabling technology for organizing opposition to corrupt and oppressive governments. Some people are looking at proposals in the United States to create an Internet 'kill switch' in light of the events in Egypt, finding comparisons and suggesting dire consequences. But first, looking a how Egypt's access to the internet got shut off, it's not clear that any magic technology was at work -- just old fashioned authoritarian government action. That prospect, not a technical kill capability, is more foreboding.

Reports suggest that officials in Cairo simply contacted -- by telephone, perhaps -- each of Egypt's major ISPs and ordered them to cut off access. Each of them acquiesced meekly. The limited connectivity remaining is telling: Only Noor Data Networks is still connected. Egypt's stock market connects to the world over Noor. In addition, a majority of traffic to the middle east and Asia passes through Egypt, and that traffic is not blocked.

Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) has filed the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act (S. 3480) to give the president “emergency measures" for shutting off Internet access, without judicial review. Sen. Lieberman has shown his hand in response to Wikileaks, when he intimidated Amazon into dropping Wikileaks from their cloud servers. Paypal caved and cut off Wikileaks without even being directly asked by any US official.

Experience indicates that neither technological magic nor enabling legislation is needed when a government wants to crack down on dissent by closing off communications.