Our government rulers are a bunch of lying tyrants. At the same time Hillary Clinton is shaking her finger at tyrants in the middle east telling them they it is wrong to shut down the Internet, tyrants in our Congress are debating at giving our President the power to shut down the Internet.

I just think of a person that re-posts article I find on government abuse. But I suspect the government thugs that spy on the my posts consider me a dangerous criminal because these article make the government look like a dangerous criminal.

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'Kill Switch' Internet bill alarms privacy experts

by Jon Swartz - Feb. 15, 2011 03:29 PM

USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO -- A raging debate over new legislation, and its impact on the Internet, has tongues wagging and fingers pointing from Silicon Valley to Washington, D.C.

Just as the Egyptian government recently forced the Internet to go dark, U.S. officials could flip the switch if the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset legislation becomes law, say its critics.

Proponents of the bill, which is expected to be reintroduced in the current session of Congress, dismiss the detractors as ill-informed -- even naive.

The ominously nicknamed Kill Switch bill is sure to be a flashpoint of discussion at the RSA Conference, the nation's largest gathering of computer-security experts that takes place here this week.

The bill -- crafted by Sens. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn.; Susan Collins, R-Maine; and Tom Carper, D-Del. -- aims to defend the economic infrastructure from a cyberterrorist attack. But it has free-speech advocates and privacy experts howling over the prospect of a government agency quelling the communication of hundreds of millions of people.

"This is all about control, an attempt to control every aspect of our existence," says Christopher Feudo, a cybersecurity expert who is chairman of SecurityFusion Solutions. "I consider it an attack on our personal right of free speech. Look what recently occurred in Egypt."

Its critics immediately dubbed it Kill Switch, suffusing it with Big Brother-tinged foreboding. "Unfortunately, it got this label, which is analogous to death panels (during the health care debates)," says Mark Kagan, director of research at Keane Federal Systems, an information-technology contractor for the government.

The disruption to communications and economic activity "could be catastrophic," says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Reasons to flip the 'Kill Switch'

Advocates of a bill to protect the nation's cyberdefenses point to several computer breaches as evidence of a threat to critical infrastructure:

-- Hackers in China may have swiped sensitive information from several international oil and energy companies for as long as four years, cybersecurity firm McAfee said in a report last week. The "coordinated covert and targeted cyberattack" victims included companies in the U.S., Taiwan, Greece and Kazakhstan.

-- Computer hackers have repeatedly broken into the systems of the company that runs the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York over the past year, but they haven't penetrated its trading system. "Whether political or financial gain, it illustrates the fragility of computer networks," says Frank Andrus, chief technology officer at security firm Bradford Networks.

-- The Stuxnet computer worm wiped out about 20% of Iran's nuclear centrifuges and helped delay, though not destroy, Tehran's ability to make its first nuclear arms, according to a report this year from TheNew York Times.

-- Cyberattacks in Brazil paralyzed services that affected millions. The first, north of Rio de Janeiro in January 2005, affected tens of thousands of people. The second, beginning September 2007 in the state of Espirito Santo, hit more than 3 million people in dozens of cities over two days, causing major disruptions. The world's largest iron ore producer, in Vitoria, had seven plants knocked offline, costing the company $7 million. It is unclear who orchestrated the attacks or why.

-- In March 2001, a disgruntled former employee in Australia was convicted of using a computer and radio gear to hack into a computerized sewage system and release millions of liters of waste into public waterways.

-- Teenage hacker Michael Calce, aka MafiaBoy, took down Yahoo, eBay, Amazon.com and others with a denial-of-service attack in 2000.

Computer-security expert Ira Winkler, a staunch advocate of the legislation, counters, "The fact that people are complaining about this fact is grossly ignorant of the real world. The fact critical infrastructure elements are even accessible to the Internet is the worst part to begin with."

The overheated debate takes place against the backdrop of revolution in the Middle East and a recent breach of Nasdaq's computer system. Both underline the power of the Internet, its vulnerability and the importance of cybersecurity.

It also underscores the delicate balance between protecting the Internet -- the largest communications device -- and unfettered free speech.

The autocratic government of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak ordered the shutdown of four major Internet service providers, effectively shuttering the Internet in Egypt for several days. Could that happen in the U.S. if the bill becomes law?

In the U.S., there are 2,000 to 4,000 Internet providers, many of whom virulently oppose government interference that would put a clamp-down on their businesses.

"When it comes to practicalities, I would be surprised if anything comes to (a kill switch)," says Reputation.com CEO Michael Fertik, a lawyer with expertise in constitutional law and Internet privacy law. "If (the bill and president) strays too far, it would be extremely unpopular." A national necessity?

Last month, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and other congressional members introduced a placeholder bill and stressed that a cybersecurity measure is a top priority for the 112th Congress.

Carper, Collins and Lieberman have yet to announce plans to reintroduce the bill. But it is likely to be included as part of a larger, more comprehensive bill that includes other bits of legislation, say sources close to Lieberman who are not authorized to speak publicly about the bill.

"There can be no debate over whether our nation needs to improve its cyberdefenses," Lieberman, chairman of the powerful Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, said in a statement. "Our legislation is designed to improve these defenses, while protecting the fundamental freedoms that we all cherish."

Lieberman did not comment on whether the bill will be reintroduced.

Proponents of the bill say it is narrowly crafted and does not intend to limit speech but to eliminate the vulnerability of critical systems such as banks, the power grid and telecommunications from attacks by terrorists or agents of hostile countries.

Indeed, the bill specifically does not grant the president power to act unless a cyberattack threatens to cause more than $25 billion in damages in a year, kill more than 2,500 people or force mass evacuations. The president would have the ability to pinpoint what to clamp down on without causing economic damage to U.S. interests, for anywhere from 30 to 120 days with the approval of Congress, according to the bill.

"This is not Big Brother," says Tom Kellermann, vice president of security awareness at Core Security Technologies, and a former security expert for the World Bank. "It's not about shutting off the Internet, but taking a scalpel to command control to key services to protect them."

Winkler, chief security strategist of TechnoDyne, a systems-integration specialist for financial institutions, pharmaceutical companies and government agencies, agrees. "Nobody is giving Obama the ability to kill Twitter access," Winkler says. "There might possibly be unintended consequences, but people are ignoring imminent harm because there may be theoretical harm if the country devolves into a state of anarchy."

Examples abound, say Kellermann and others, underscoring the looming threat.

More industries could be at risk, Kagan and others warn. "It's 10 years after 9/11, and some companies still do not do a good job defending their computer systems," Kagan says, pointing to major chemical facilities as prime targets.

"Espionage and crimes have exploded on the Internet," Kellermann says. "There has been anarchy over attempts to leverage assets. This closes the spigot on attempted attacks by hostile forces." Opposition and execution

Cyberthreats aside, deep questions persist over what critics claim is the bill's heavy-handed approach, what it means to free speech and whether it can be enforced practically.

The crux of the issue, to computer-law expert Fertik and others, is if the Internet is a national asset, should it be nationalized?

"Determining where the Internet connects to infrastructure is hard to define and impose," Kagan says.

"In its current form, the legislation offers no clear means to check that power," says Timothy Karr, campaign director for media-policy group Free Press, a non-profit organization.

A 1934 federal law that created the Federal Communications Commission allows the president to "authorize the use or control" of communications outlets during moments of emergency of "public peril or disaster." The Lieberman-led bill would be considered a specific extension of that and let the nation's chief executive prioritize communications on the Internet, says Fertik.

A provision in the bill lets the president take limited control during an emergency and decide restrictions. "It, essentially, gives the president a loaded gun," Fertik says.

"Say there is a mounted attack from a terrorist group on the Internet," Fertik says. "(The law) could present the president with a kill switch option. But what are the conditions, and how far does (the law) go?"

The debate extends to minutiae in the bill's wording.

It neither expressly calls for the creation of an Internet kill switch nor does it exclude one. It only requires the president to notify Congress before taking action, and it specifically prohibits judicial review of the president's designation of critical infrastructure. The non-profit Center for Democracy and Technology, in a measured letter to Lieberman, Collins and others, wants more specifics on the sweep of "emergency" measures mentioned in the bill.

"In our constitutional system of checks and balances, that concentrates far too much power in one branch of government," says Karr. "The devil is always in the details, and here the details suggest that this is a dangerous bill that threatens our free-speech rights."

Giving the president broad power to "interfere" with the Internet -- even bottling up chunks of it in the name of national security -- would require him to go to court to stop communications, says Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.

What's more, a new law may be next to impossible to administer widely, technology experts say.

"Whether nuclear or the Internet, there is no 'off' button or switch. There is a clear chain of command," Kagan says. "This notion of an all-consuming switch only happens in the movies."

Mubarak was able to temporarily silence the Internet because there are a small number of Internet providers in Egypt. Yet, even with the nationwide digital blockade, activists still communicated effectively, using old-fashioned methods.

Silencing portions of the Internet faces a steeper challenge in the U.S., where there are thousands of Internet providers and where the federal government's previous efforts to clamp down on hostile threats have met with little success, says EPIC's Rotenberg.

He points to a non-Internet example, the struggle to contain the nation's borders. "That was tried with (the Department of Homeland Security) on the border fence, and it was a disaster," Rotenberg says.

While Congress debates and Internet kill switch for America, government hypocrite Hillary Clinton shovels the BS and says other countries deserve an Internet without a kill switch.

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Clinton: U.S. to boost support for cyber dissidents

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States stands with cyber dissidents and democracy activists from the Middle East to China and beyond, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Tuesday.

She pledged to expand the Obama administration's efforts to foil Internet repression in autocratic states.

In an impassioned speech on Internet freedom, Clinton said the administration would spend $25 million this year on initiatives designed to protect bloggers and help them get around curbs like the Great Firewall of China, the gagging of social media sites in Iran, Cuba, Syria, Vietnam and Myanmar as well as Egypt's recent unsuccessful attempt to thwart anti-government protests by simply pulling the plug on online communication.

She also said the State Department, which last week launched Twitter feeds in Arabic and Farsi to connect with populations throughout the Arab countries and Iran, would broaden the reach of its online miniappeals for human rights and democracy by creating accounts that cater to audiences in China, Russia and India in their native languages.

Clinton challenged authoritarian leaders and regimes to embrace online freedom and the demands of cyber dissidents or risk being toppled by tides of unrest, similar to what has happened in Egypt and Tunisia to longtime presidents Hosni Mubarak and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

"History has shown us that repression often sows the seeds for revolution down the road," she said. "Those who clamp down on Internet freedom may be able to hold back the full impact of their people's yearnings for a while, but not forever."

"Leaders worldwide have a choice to make," Clinton said. "They can let the Internet in their countries flourish, and take the risk that the freedoms it enables will lead to a greater demand for political rights. Or they can constrict the Internet, choke the freedoms it naturally sustains, and risk losing all the economic and social benefits that come from a networked society."

"We believe that governments who have erected barriers to internet freedom, whether they're technical filters or censorship regimes or attacks on those who exercise their rights to expression and assembly online, will eventually find themselves boxed in," she said. "They will face a dictator's dilemma, and will have to choose between letting the walls fall or paying the price to keep them standing, which means both doubling down on a losing hand by resorting to greater oppression, and enduring the escalating opportunity cost of missing out on the ideas that have been blocked."

She said fighting restrictions would not be easy but stressed that the United States is committed to ensuring the Internet remains an open forum for discourse.

"While the rights we seek to protect are clear, the various ways that these rights are violated are increasingly complex," Clinton said.

The U.S. will "help people in oppressive Internet environments get around filters, stay one step ahead of the censors, the hackers and the thugs who beat them up or imprison them for what they say online," she said in the speech to students at the George Washington University. She countered criticism leveled at the administration for not investing in a single technological fix to overcome government controls, saying there was "no silver bullet" and "no app" to do that. Instead, she said, the U.S. would take a multipronged approach.

Clinton's remarks, her second major address about Internet freedom since becoming America's top diplomat, come amid a groundswell of protests around the Middle East that have been abetted by online agitators using social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to organize anti-government demonstrations from Algeria to Yemen, Syria, Iran and Jordan.

Despite the Obama administration's own problems with an unfettered Internet, most notably the release of hundreds of thousands of sensitive diplomatic documents by the WikiLeaks website, Clinton said the United States is unwavering in its commitment to cyber freedom, even as it seeks to prosecute online criminals and terrorists.

She drew a distinction between attempts to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing the material along with the suspected leaker and measures taken by repressive regimes to crack down on opponents.

"The WikiLeaks incident began with a theft just as if it had been executed by smuggling papers in a briefcase," she said. "The fact that Wikileaks used the Internet is not the reason we criticized it. Wikileaks does not challenge our commitment to Internet freedom."

Clinton argued that the Internet is neither good nor bad, a force for neither liberation nor repression. It is the sum of what its users make it, she says.

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Egypt Leaders Found ‘Off’ Switch for Internet

By JAMES GLANZ and JOHN MARKOFF

Published: February 15, 2011

Epitaphs for the Mubarak government all note that the mobilizing power of the Internet was one of the Egyptian opposition’s most potent weapons. But quickly lost in the swirl of revolution was the government’s ferocious counterattack, a dark achievement that many had thought impossible in the age of global connectedness. In a span of minutes just after midnight on Jan. 28, a technologically advanced, densely wired country with more than 20 million people online was essentially severed from the global Internet.

The blackout was lifted after just five days, and it did not save President Hosni Mubarak. But it has mesmerized the worldwide technical community and raised concerns that with unrest coursing through the Middle East, other autocratic governments — many of them already known to interfere with and filter specific Web sites and e-mails — may also possess what is essentially a kill switch for the Internet.

Because the Internet’s legendary robustness and ability to route around blockages are part of its basic design, even the world’s most renowned network and telecommunications engineers have been perplexed that the Mubarak government succeeded in pulling the maneuver off.

But now, as Egyptian engineers begin to assess fragmentary evidence and their own knowledge of the Egyptian Internet’s construction, they are beginning to understand what, in effect, hit them. Interviews with many of those engineers, as well as an examination of data collected around the world during the blackout, indicate that the government exploited a devastating combination of vulnerabilities in the national infrastructure.

For all the Internet’s vaunted connectivity, the Egyptian government commanded powerful instruments of control: it owns the pipelines that carry information across the country and out into the world.

Internet experts say similar arrangements are more common in authoritarian countries than is generally recognized. In Syria, for example, the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment dominates the infrastructure, and the bulk of the international traffic flows through a single pipeline to Cyprus. Jordan, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries have the same sort of dominant, state-controlled carrier.

Over the past several days, activists in Bahrain and Iran say they have seen strong evidence of severe Internet slowdowns amid protests there. Concerns over the potential for a government shutdown are particularly high in North African countries, most of which rely on a just a small number of fiber-optic lines for most of their international Internet traffic.

A Double Knockout

The attack in Egypt relied on a double knockout, the engineers say. As in many authoritarian countries, Egypt’s Internet must connect to the outside world through a tiny number of international portals that are tightly in the grip of the government. In a lightning strike, technicians first cut off nearly all international traffic through those portals.

In theory, the domestic Internet should have survived that strike. But the cutoff also revealed how dependent Egypt’s internal networks are on moment-to-moment information from systems that exist only outside the country — including e-mail servers at companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo; data centers in the United States; and the Internet directories called domain name servers, which can be physically located anywhere from Australia to Germany.

The government’s attack left Egypt not only cut off from the outside world, but also with its internal systems in a sort of comatose state: servers, cables and fiber-optic lines were largely up and running, but too confused or crippled to carry information save a dribble of local e-mail traffic and domestic Web sites whose Internet circuitry somehow remained accessible.

“They drilled unexpectedly all the way down to the bottom layer of the Internet and stopped all traffic flowing,” said Jim Cowie, chief technology officer of Renesys, a network management company based in New Hampshire that has closely monitored Internet traffic from Egypt. “With the scope of their shutdown and the size of their online population, it is an unprecedented event.”

The engineers say that a focal point of the attack was an imposing building at 26 Ramses Street in Cairo, just two and a half miles from the epicenter of the protests, Tahrir Square. At one time purely a telephone network switching center, the building now houses the crucial Internet exchange that serves as the connection point for fiber-optic links provided by five major network companies that provide the bulk of the Internet connectivity going into and out of the country.

“In Egypt the actual physical and logical connections to the rest of the world are few, and they are licensed by the government and they are tightly controlled,” said Wael Amin, president of ITWorx, a large software development company based in Cairo.

One of the government’s strongest levers is Telecom Egypt, a state-owned company that engineers say owns virtually all the country’s fiber-optic cables; other Internet service providers are forced to lease bandwidth on those cables in order to do business.

Mr. Cowie noted that the shutdown in Egypt did not appear to have diminished the protests — if anything, it inflamed them — and that it would cost untold millions of dollars in lost business and investor confidence in the country. But he added that, inevitably, some autocrats would conclude that Mr. Mubarak had simply waited too long to bring down the curtain.

“Probably there are people who will look at this and say, it really worked pretty well, he just blew the timing,” Mr. Cowie said.

Speaking of the Egyptian shutdown and the earlier experience in Tunisia, whose censorship methods were less comprehensive, a senior State Department official said that “governments will draw different conclusions.”

“Some may take measures to tighten communications networks,” said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Others may conclude that these things are woven so deeply into the culture and commerce of their country that they interfere at their peril. Regardless, it is certainly being widely discussed in the Middle East and North Africa.”

Vulnerable Choke Points

In Egypt, where the government still has not explained how the Internet was taken down, engineers across the country are putting together clues from their own observations to understand what happened this time, and to find out whether a future cutoff could be circumvented on a much wider scale than it was when Mr. Mubarak set his attack in motion.

The strength of the Internet is that it has no single point of failure, in contrast to more centralized networks like the traditional telephone network. The routing of each data packet is handled by a web of computers known as routers, so that in principle each packet might take a different route. The complete message or document is then reassembled at the receiving end.

Yet despite this decentralized design, the reality is that most traffic passes through vast centralized exchanges — potential choke points that allow many nations to monitor, filter or in dire cases completely stop the flow of Internet data.

China, for example, has built an elaborate national filtering system known as the Golden Shield Project, and in 2009 it shut down cellphone and Internet service amid unrest in the Muslim region of Xinjiang. Nepal’s government briefly disconnected from the Internet in the face of civil unrest in 2005, and so did Myanmar’s government in 2007.

But until Jan. 28 in Egypt, no country had revealed that control of those choke points could allow the government to shut down the Internet almost entirely.

There has been intense debate both inside and outside Egypt on whether the cutoff at 26 Ramses Street was accomplished by surgically tampering with the software mechanism that defines how networks at the core of the Internet communicate with one another, or by a blunt approach: simply cutting off the power to the router computers that connect Egypt to the outside world.

But either way, the international portals were shut, and the domestic system reeled from the blow.

The Lines Go Dead

The first hints of the blackout had actually emerged the day before, Jan. 27, as opposition leaders prepared for a “Friday of anger,” with huge demonstrations expected. Ahmed ElShabrawy, who runs a company called EgyptNetwork, noticed that the government had begun blocking individual sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Just after midnight on Jan. 28, Mahmoud Amin’s iPhone beeped with an alert that international connections to his consulting company’s Internet system had vanished — and then the iPhone itself stopped receiving e-mail. A few minutes later, Mr. ElShabrawy received an urgent call telling him that all Internet lines running to his company were dead.

It was not long before Ayman Bahaa, director of Egyptian Universities Network, which developed the country’s Internet nearly two decades ago, was scrambling to figure out how the system had all but collapsed between the strokes of 12 and 1.

The system had been crushed so completely that when a network engineer who does repairs in Cairo woke in the morning, he said to his family, “I feel we are in the 1800s.”

Over the next five days, the government furiously went about extinguishing nearly all of the Internet links to the outside world that had survived the first assault, data collected by Western network monitors show. Although a few Egyptians managed to post to Facebook or send sporadic e-mails, the vast majority of the country’s Internet subscribers were cut off.

The most telling bit of evidence was that some Internet services inside the country were still working, at least sporadically. American University in Cairo, frantically trying to relocate students and faculty members away from troubled areas, was unable to use e-mail, cellphones — which were also shut down — or even a radio frequency reserved for security teams. But the university was able to update its Web site, hosted on a server inside Egypt, and at least some people were able to pull up the site and follow the emergency instructions.

“The servers were up,” said Nagwa Nicola, the chief technology officer at American University in Cairo. “You could reach up to the Internet provider itself, but you wouldn’t get out of the country.” Ms. Nicola said that no notice had been given, and she depicted an operation that appeared to have been carried out with great secrecy.

“When we called the providers, they said, ‘Um, hang on, we just have a few problems and we’ll be on again,’ ” she said. “They wouldn’t tell us it was out.”

She added, “It wasn’t expected at all that something like that would happen.”

Told to Shut Down or Else

Individual Internet service providers were also called on the carpet and ordered to shut down, as they are required to do by their licensing agreements if the government so decrees.

According to an Egyptian engineer and an international telecom expert who both spoke on the condition of anonymity, at least one provider, Vodafone, expressed extreme reluctance to shut down but was told that if it did not comply, the government would use its own “off” switch via the Telecom Egypt infrastructure — a method that would be much more time-consuming to reverse. Other exchanges, like an important one in Alexandria, may also have been involved.

Still, even major providers received little notice that the moves were afoot, said an Egyptian with close knowledge of the telecom industry who would speak only anonymously.

“You don’t get a couple of days with something like this,” he said. “It was less than an hour.”

After the Internet collapsed, Mr. ElShabrawy, 35, whose company provides Internet service to 2,000 subscribers and develops software for foreign and domestic customers, made urgent inquiries with the Ministry of Communications, to no avail. So he scrambled to re-establish his own communications.

When he, too, noticed that domestic fiber-optic cables were open, he had a moment of exhilaration, remembering that he could link up servers directly and establish messaging using an older system called Internet Relay Chat. But then it dawned on him that he had always assumed he could download the necessary software via the Internet and had saved no copy.

“You don’t have your tools — you don’t have anything,” Mr. ElShabrawy said he realized as he stared at the dead lines at his main office in Mansoura, about 60 miles outside Cairo.

With the streets unsafe because of marauding bands of looters, he decided to risk having a driver bring $7,000 in satellite equipment, including a four-foot dish, from Cairo, and somehow he was connected internationally again by Monday evening.

Steeling himself for the blast of complaints from angry customers — his company also provides texting services in Europe and the Middle East — Mr. ElShabrawy found time to post videos of the protests in Mansoura on his Facebook page. But with security officials asking questions about what he was up to, he did not dare hook up his domestic subscribers.

Then, gingerly, he reached out to his international customers, his profuse apologies already framed in his mind.

The response that poured in astonished Mr. ElShabrawy, who is nothing if not a conscientious businessman, even in turbulent times. “People said: ‘Don’t worry about that. We are fine and we need to know that you are fine. We are all supporting you.’ ”