Speaking of destroying the internet, CBSNews.com reporter Declan McCullagh reports Senators Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) recently introduced legislation that would give the president the authority to seize control of the Internet and order a shut-down of Internet traffic during a “cybersecurity emergency.”
Despite vocal concerns from telecommunications companies and civil liberties groups, the bill’s sponsors maintain that the bill is necessary to protect the nation’s cyber infrastructure security. “We must protect our critical infrastructure at all costs–from our water to our electricity, to banking, traffic lights and electronic health records,” Rockefeller said. Agreed. Sort of. “At all costs?” That might be a bridge too far. Cybersecurity should be a top government priority, given our national infrastructure’s dependence on the Internet, but at what cost?
President Obama has acknowledged that the United States is “not as prepared as we should be,” when it comes to cybersecurity, and in May said that “[the government’s] pursuit of cybersecurity will not — I repeat, will not include — monitoring private networks or Internet traffic.”
As with campaign promises, that may have been wishful thinking on the president’s part. The bill’s text takes a markedly different tack, calling for the White House to engage in “periodic mapping” of private networks to determine which of those networks are “critical” to national security. Those companies that maintain critical private networks are then required to share certain requested information with the government, but the Rockefeller-Snowe bill, in its current form, lacks the necessary internal checks on the vast power it grants the president over private networks and fails to spell out exactly what limitations would be placed on the government in the monitoring process. Before the telecommunications industry (not to mention the general public) can rest easily, the amorphous powers granted in the bill will need to be reigned in to curb opportunities for abuse of those powers.
Not everyone is concerned about the bill’s prospective reach, however. According to McCullagh, a Senate source familiar with the legislation likens the president’s authority to shut down the internet to President Bush’s grounding of all aircraft immediately proceeding the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The obvious difference between the two examples is that the government is not required to access vast quantities of sensitive personal information in order to ground airplanes. Shutting down critical networks in the event of a cyber emergency means knowing exactly which private networks are “critical,” which by necessity means some level of monitoring. Without an appropriate process for administrative review and healthy checks on the extent of the government’s monitoring power, the bill will have a hard time garnering the necessary support to get passed.