oh my eyes.

please use text breaks. please.

DaveBax... you're mixing metaphors but I understand you have a trust/belief issue... and that's fine. You shouldn't trust or believe. You should research and think for yourself and take interest in what the people you have faith in say...also with a grain of doubt.

Scoutdog, What I believe is that an Infra, Intranet or securenet should be developed for those emergencies. Not a sledgehammer like others wrote of, but rather a smooth engagement of one while the other is sealed off from attack.

I know I mixed a couple things, sorry about that.

As far as think for yourself and do research I have a personal feeling on this. I went through research and more research starting in 2005 and put to much on the faith part which didn't work out when actually the research said something different as research I was checking had already been proven. I'm working on seperating things and best if I stay away from this type of thread as I still tend to get personal but don't mean any harm. So best I just sit back and read the post as some of it is interresting with the different views.

I was speaking in general, not specific to the scinario.

But another good scinario is the cyber attack in Terminator 3! Not withstanding the cardinal insult that a computer in a vehicle can control the vehicles with no servo devices connected to the primary controls!! Ouch!!! And the producer decided that fact would not be noticed by fans???

There are two kinds of bloopers that show up in movies -

1) ones that are passive, most people wouldn't even notice them and if the did, it would be of momentary interest and then forgotten.

2) Ones that are aggressive, they leap out of the movie and give you a massive slap on the face and it just destroys the whole movie.

That terminator3 blooper not only slapped me in the face, but it knocked me right out of my chair!!! I think it would have been better if the director of terminator3 edited all that out and replaced it with a film of him taking a shit on our heads, honestly, because that is basically what he did to our intelligence!

Oh, yeah, some kids like to knock down web sites here and there. So what? Such 'attacks' on govt web sites happen all the time and present no real threat to anything. Moreover, intent of such 'attack' is to either raise attention (like anons do) or make information unaccessible. By disabling national internet, you are just doing what attackers are trying to - you disable ALL these sites yourself.

As for espionage, in most cases it is done via malware, and disabling internet will be no help these, as target computers are not connected to internet anyway, and malware is designed to spread via flash drives and other means.

I did waste some hours reading that report, but still do not see how it justifies Internet lockdown. Text mostly is too vague to properly understand what kind of threats they are talking about, and I'm suspecting its primary intent is to give false impression of China's IW offencive capabilities to report readers.

I'm not saying IW does not exist. But its nature is far from what journalists and such Krekel's are drawing to the public. There are no 'attack dates', there is long-term, routine work, which can be countered only by according enforced security policies.

a simple NO. If you want to turn off the net in your house, turn the modem off at the power switch. We don't need the government dictating when or where we have access to it. Common sense should prevail here.

Yes, like Abrams' version of the Enterprise having a brewery in its guts and long stretches of clear pipe big enough for Scotty to swim in. Gah.

Back on topic, I take the public fearmongering about IT warfare with shovels of salt. Lieberman's latest whinging point reads to me like little more than an attempt to sound as if he understands the modern world, which I seriously doubt. What I also seriously doubt is the mere possibility of any functional 'kill switch.'

The Internet was developed by DARPA (yes, more essential technology created by the public sector). The original goal to build a network that was flexible enough to handle losing many major nodes and still keep traffic moving. Mix that in with what's happened since the .com swamp began growing and the only plausible sorts of lockouts are the kind of serious government and sensitive-industry firewalls/security protocols. Unless someone seriously expects a nationwide 'kill switch' to include a way of taking down every comm sat that we don't control directly.

I'd rather see our dwindling federal resources go to the existing units in the DoD that already know more about what happened to the centrifuges in Iran than we probably want to know, and are hopefully getting faster and better at their work all the time.

I'm somewhat divided on that. I've got a lot of issues with the military and their policies, and think that they are already far, far overpowered and "overweaponed". So I don't really want them to get a decent offensive cyberwarfare program for fear that it would be abused or made to backfire. But there are also a lot of other scary people out there, and I have no ill will towards my fellow American-located civvies.

Fortunately, my experience as the lead designer of Robotics Club tells me that the Do"D" high-tech warfare program is actually pretty weak. Their robots simply aren't terribly well-built, and from what I've seen of their pure-digital work (failing to obstruct Wikileaks in any noticeable manner, never pulling off a successful cyberattack, and so on) it's too rudimentary to pose much of a benefit or a threat. They could sink more money into it, of course, but none of my computer-savvy friends are considering military, government, or defense-contractor work. Half of them aren't US citizens anyway, and most of them share my beliefs on the matter.

He has some good points, but that blog is full of vile and fear.

No Dr. JBHL... I don't agree with the Internet Kill Switch either. I found out about it on the Alex Jones page I visit. There are a whole lot of stuff covered there if you'd like to see it. http://www.infowars.com .  An interesting page. You'd be surprised at the things the government is doing or would like to do.

And a cyberattack would likely be directed someplace other than Stardock Software.

I think an emergency off switch for the internet will be the new kind of panic button for the governments. It shouldn't exist!!! It's a confession of failure for the governement in my eyes. A government should always try to get in contact with people. Even if there is harsh criticism and demonstrations.

(Totalitarian) governments (will) tend to rely on internet off switches because it's one of the most used communication platforms these days.
But if you think of China as an example. Besides very strong internet regulations and censorship one of the most important and censorious social scripts was published as a book - at least here in Europe. (as a side note: The corpse walker by Liao Yiwu) [o.k. maybe even this script found it's way out of the People's republic of China by use of the internet, I'm definitly not quite sure about that, but you know what I mean]

There are many ways for critics and dissidents besides the world wide web. One day we'll go back to carrier pigeons you know... or else.