Last Spring, everyone was surprised when a draft bill was introduced that would allow the president to control the internet.  Senator Jay Rockefeller, the man behind the bill, has reintroduced the bill, S.773, after spending months revising it.  People are even less happy about it now.

CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.

If the bill becomes a law, government liaison officers at local cable and internet companies would need to be federally certified, at the company’s cost, and be given the power to switch of any user when demanded by the government.  The GLO would be under the control of bureaucrats and censors in Washington, allowing them to monitor just about everything.  This will, in effect, become state controlled internet.

The language in the bill also implies that we are going to be one step closer to requiring some sort of federally mandated certificate for IT personnel.

“I think the redraft, while improved, remains troubling due to its vagueness,” said Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, which counts representatives of Verizon, Verisign, Nortel, and Carnegie Mellon University on its board. “It is unclear what authority Sen. Rockefeller thinks is necessary over the private sector. Unless this is clarified, we cannot properly analyze, let alone support the bill.”

Rockefeller’s revised legislation…..requires a “cybersecurity workforce plan” from every federal agency, a “dashboard” pilot project, measurements of hiring effectiveness, and the implementation of a “comprehensive national cybersecurity strategy” in six months–even though its mandatory legal review will take a year to complete.

Probably the most controversial language begins in Section 201, which permits the president to “direct the national response to the cyber threat” if necessary for “the national defense and security.” The White House is supposed to engage in “periodic mapping” of private networks deemed to be critical, and those companies “shall share” requested information with the federal government. (“Cyber” is defined as anything having to do with the Internet, telecommunications, computers, or computer networks.)

“The language has changed but it doesn’t contain any real additional limits,” EFF’s Tien says. “It simply switches the more direct and obvious language they had originally to the more ambiguous (version)…The designation of what is a critical infrastructure system or network as far as I can tell has no specific process. There’s no provision for any administrative process or review. That’s where the problems seem to start. And then you have the amorphous powers that go along with it.”

The problem with legislation such as this is that the people who are creating the bill lack a fundamental understanding of how the internet works.  If an outage occurs, the internet will reroute around it.  If a  backbone or ISP is taken down, the internet will reroute around it.  This is how the internet was designed to work.

Now, if a major part of the internet was attacked, it can be corrected.  Therefore, a terrorist would need to simultaneously need to knock out every router and backbone in the USA for this bill to even remotely be relevant.

If the government tells my ISP to shut off all its customers, we are all left in the dark.  We have to then rely on news and information that is given to us by the government.  We will have no way to fact check the information for validity.

As long as two nodes are connected, you will be online.  But if your one source of connection is cut off, you aren’t getting any information that the government doesn’t want you to have.  The USA only needs to shut down 23 companies for 75% of the country to lose access.

If you’re angry about this, write to your senators.  They aren’t going to read your twitter about it and they probably aren’t going to read my article either.  Then, go to the EFF and give them a couple of bucks.  If you don’t fight it, who will?