Imagine this, you go to work and need to e-mail an important proposal to a client, or you need to check in online for your flight that departs in a few hours, or perhaps you need to pay your credit card bill online. All of these are activities are repeated thousands of times each and every minute here in the USA and around the world. Now imagine, you go to do all of these things, and you can’t. Not because you haven't paid your Internet bill, or because there is a local outage that can be overcome by going to another source. Nope, the government has just shut down the Internet and no one can get online; communication just came to a halt. This is not fear mongering, but the reality of a new senate bill, S.773, that was just introduced. http://bit.ly/a2Z4r

The new senate bill proposes that the president would have a "kill switch" to shut the Internet down in case of a national emergency. Before anyone starts to think this is a blog bashing our current president or administration, it is clearly not. This would be a very dangerous bill to pass in any administration, in any country. Forget the inconveniences to our daily lives; the damage to the economy would be devastating. Companies like eBay, Amazon, and Google would come to a screeching halt. The fear instilled to the population from a takeover like this would likely cause more damage than the actual shut down itself.

The new senate bill proposes that this "kill switch" is necessary in case of a cyber attack that affects national security. Perhaps, our government should hire private sectors of our best and brightest to help secure the Internet from attacks. Of course the government is already working on solutions to protect the Internet, but can we really rely on the government to do it? If you have ever visited Capitol Hill, you quickly realized that technology is not our government's strong suit. The argument for not allowing private sectors to have this responsibility is the fear of any one company having that kind of power. These are all fair arguments. But in a world where we continue to rely on technology, the repercussions of the greatest technology of all (Internet) being controlled by any one person is a scary thought.

If this bill was to pass, my prediction is that the level of Denial of Service attacks and Internet security threats to national security would increase a hundred fold by those wanting to test our government to see when they would use this "nuclear Internet" option. Is it possible that our government would shut down the Internet in response to these attacks and cause more damage than any attack could have? Maybe, maybe not, but I for one don’t want to find out.