Internet Kill Switch Back On the US Legislative Agenda

suraj.sun points out a story at Wired that US lawmakers have revived the idea of a government-controlled "Internet Kill Switch," which reads, in part: "The bill, which has bipartisan support, is being floated by Sen. Susan Collins, the Republican ranking member on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The proposed legislation, which Collins said would not give the president the same power Egypt's Hosni Mubarak is exercising to quell dissent, sailed through the Homeland Security Committee in December but expired with the new Congress weeks later. 'My legislation would provide a mechanism for the government to work with the private sector in the event of a true cyber emergency,' Collins said in an e-mail Friday. 'It would give our nation the best tools available to swiftly respond to a significant threat.'"

Re:Expectations were too high.

[Amorymeltzer]

It doesn't stand a chance. All it needs is for one person to compare a sponsor of this bill to Mubarak and it should be dead in the water. You can't bring something like this up right after all this tumult.

From Net Neutrality to Net Fatality

[SuperKendall]

I can't see any reasonable purpose for a government being able to shut down internet access in broad swathes; any internet "emergency" could (and would) realistically be handled quite well by the array of network providers involved in standing up the internet. Otherwise botnets would have killed us all long ago.

Re:It is just data!

[mlyle]

Name one thing you know firsthand is connected to the Internet and could result in casualties if attacked. Sure banks computers could crash, sure amazon could go down, but ICBMs are not going to launch and the power grid wont go down. If anything that could actually cause casualties is connected to the Internet then it shouldn't be.

http://www.devicesworld.net/ [devicesworld.net]

SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) technology provides the means to monitor and control distributed systems from a central location. They are used widely in the telecommunications, power distribution, oil & gas and transportation industries. SCADA systems are typically deployed with dedicated communication infrastructure, proprietary software and hardware.

iSCADA, on the other hand is an Internet-based SCADA solution that utilizes the public Internet infrastructure as the data communication medium. It uniquely combines traditional SCADA technology with the open data communication protocols, services and data formats of the public Internet to deliver cost-effective and easy-to-use SCADA solutions. With iSCADA, it is now feasible to monitor and control virtually anything from anywhere in the world.

This kind of stuff is getting deployed more and more.