Two bills were recently introduced that bring the idea of Internet regulation. They would set up the Office of the National Cybersecurity Advisor who would report directly to the president and give the president the power to, in an extreme "cyber" emergency, turn off the Internet in the U.S. The bills are still both in the first state of the legislative process so they are far from being applied but I thought it was an interesting concept.
The Internet is a very crucial part of almost everyday life now. Seriously, is there a day when you aren't on the Internet? To shut it down would mean to literally cut communication and information by a lot and also kill securities. Banks and tons of other finances would be frozen with no way of retrieval until the Internet resumed.
Would it violate our rights and would the government use this to their advantage by censoring certain things? They would have access to virtually everyones private files without regard to any previous laws. Is this too much power forthe government and more specifically the president? How could these bills be improved?
I think that something to address Internet security needs to happen, but the bounds of this legislation are far too broad for the government. If people thought the Patriot Act was an invasion of privacy then I wonder what they'd do when the Internet shut down.
Granting the Secretary of Commerce "access to all privately owned information networks deemed to be critical to the nation's infrastructure "without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule or policy restricting such access."" is really really REALLY bad sounding. How about we just let policeman stand over our shoulders in our house when we are on the internet to protect us. The government has their own networking and defense against cybernet invaders to protect against people getting the "secrets". I think that's more than enough. The UK is currently battling with this same debate, or Net neutrality. They had a conference, and google declined to come saying such practices were biased and "extreme... unattractive and impractical". Companies in canada want to do something along the lines of charging per website. The internet is free press, and what we are doing is the beginning of taking it away. It would be more restrictive than china's internet laws. Once again, it all boils down to money.
ReplyDelete"A free press can be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom a press will never be anything but bad." Albert Camus
These websites explain it very well.
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/canada_net_censorship.html
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2006/11/02/tech-neutrality.html
I think shutting down the internet in case of emergency can damage certain people's lives, although they would have not intended to. Living in today's internet-based world, a lot of people use the internet as the ways to make their financial profits. There are many on-line shopping sites, domain owners, and companies which run with working on things related to the internet such as web-design companies. Even U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has declared that the filing applications would soon be available by online only. In addition, so many people now keep the relationships relying on the internet access internationally. Once the internet has been shut for days due to the emergency all of the sudden, it will end up hurting more people.
ReplyDeleteI also think it will ultimately hurt people if these bills were to pass. Lives would be put on hold and the United States would be virtually shut off from the rest of the world. We would then have to solely rely on the information our own country provided which is already skewed enough. I doubt these bills will pass, but the very idea of them bothers me.
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