Obama Internet kill switch plan approved by US Senate

Techworld reports:

A US Senate committee has approved a wide-ranging cybersecurity bill that some critics have suggested would give the US president the authority to shut down parts of the Internet during a cyberattack.

Senator Joe Lieberman and other bill sponsors have refuted the charges that the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act gives the president an Internet "kill switch." Instead, the bill puts limits on the powers the president already has to cause "the closing of any facility or stations for wire communication" in a time of war, as described in the Communications Act of 1934, they said in a breakdown of the bill published on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee website.

There are quite a few problems with Senator Lieberman's rationalization. "War" has become a pretty nebulous term these days. Prior to the Korean War, Congress took it's constitutionally enumerated power as the body of government authorized to declare war quite seriously. Since that time the mere notion of a formal declaration of war has become passé. We've essentially been in a perpetual state of war since 9/14/2001 when Congress gave President Bush carte blanche to go into Afghanistan to pursue the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks.

What happens if someday the US finds itself in the same situation that Iran found itself in the summer of 2009? Twitter was integral in allowing the people of Iran to organize and mobilize during the chaos subsequent to their highly contested presidential election. The Iranian government had essentially shut down the media and the Internet; were it not for Twitter the world would have had nary a detail about the brutality of the state in the uprising that followed the election.

We cannot afford to give our government such power. Have we learned nothing from our post-9/11 experience including the passage of the Patriot Act? Many of the provisions of the Patriot Act were supposed to sunset 12/31/2005. Over five years later President Obama reauthorized key portions of the act including roving wiretaps, records access and tracking terror suspects not affiliated with any group.

The Internet is the last bastion of freedom in America; we cannot simply allow it to go quietly into the night.