Does The Government Need A Kill Switch?

[empireofreason]

White House rhetoric has been heating up lately on the claim that cyber crimes can be justification for war. I believe it is conditioning Americans to give up their online freedom to the unpopular Kill Switch Bill. The bill for an Internet Kill Switch gives the ability of the government to shut down all or parts of the Internet or filter content. Let's here it from both sides. Does the Government need an Internet Kill Switch? If so, why? If not, why not?

A kill switch will not change security of any particular government site. This must be done by the server, not the path that leads to the server. In terms of business, it is not the job of the government to stop attacks through cutting off the highway to a business, instead it is the business' responsibility to program a server and implement hardware that handles the security.

Having such a switch I believe creates more weakness in security and gives the government too much power over information. It would make it easier for hackers to hijack the "so-called" protection the Kill Switch provides because software itself may be hacked. And, it would give the government more power to control any content it disagreed with. This could be used by any party that gets into office which would be a threat to anyone who believes in a Democracy. Even if you are against a Democracy, it's a roll of a dice who might abuse this power once it's put in place.

A couple of recent stories relevant to the issue:
Return of the Internet Kill Switch
BBC News - US Pentagon to treat cyber-attacks as 'acts of war'

 

[StillBallin75]

only in the case that the internet morphs into skynet.

 

[jamesrage]

Only dictators want kill internet kill switches. If they are that damn worried about a cyber attack then they can pull the plug to the military servers and computers themselves not cut off the internet for everybody else.