Both politely decline comment on government-ordered Internet blackout
Cisco and Juniper aren’t touching Egypt. Both companies declined comment when asked if they are in communication with their service provider customers there after Egypt threw the “kill switch” on its Internet communications 24 hours ago in the wake of political unrest in that country.
We wanted Cisco and Juniper to explain to us and our readers how they handle such a situation. We wanted to know if they are assisting – or even able to assist — their ISP customers in dealing with the situation or if they are able to recommend ways to work around the government mandated outage in order to continue operating.
We wanted to know what would happen when BGP routes are allowed to be advertised again. Should ISPs open the floodgates? Or stagger the re-introduction so as not to buckle Egypt’s networks?
We wanted to learn what the vendors can do, if anything, when a government throws the “kill switch” on the Internet. And if they thought it could happen here.
“Thanks for asking. Have a nice day!”
We can’t blame them. They could put the safety of their customers and workers in Egypt or anywhere else in peril by opining on the situation. They made the prudent decision.
But that didn’t stop some of their customers here from chiming in. Comments were fast and furious on the NANOG e-mail reflector once the routes started disappearing in Egypt. There’s even a chronology of events of who saw what when, and where.
You can read some of that here.
And on the idea of a “kill switch” for Internet communications in the U.S.? Don’t laugh – a bill was presented to Congress two years ago proposing such a plan in the event of a cyberattack on U.S. networks.
On its face, perhaps the intention of the bill was for national security. But talk about a slippery slope… when would the President not use it?
North American operators are confident no such “kill switch” will be allowed over here. But in the unlikely event one is, well, the ramifications could be profound:
“The federal would also have authority over ‘interstate’ communications. The question would be how much control does the federal government have on communications within state borders,” asks one operator who only identified himself as “George B.” “If both ends of the communication and the communication path are located inside the borders of a state, there could be some legitimate question about the governments authority to order communications shut off. So would I shut off my peering sessions with peers where the session is on a router in my state?
“We would probably very carefully parse any order by the federal government and comply to the extent that we can yet also aim to leave as much of our business operating as possible. This order would be akin to the federal government ordering all roads closed. Sure, the federal government would have the authority to stop traffic at the border and across state lines, but do they have the authority to tell you that you can’t drive to your doctor up the street? We seem to forget that the authority of the federal government does not extend, by default, into affairs conducted completely within the borders of a state and that the state is the authority for that traffic.”
Said another, reminiscing on his days at Worldcom with Bernie Ebbers:
“A number of years ago I was a Director at WorldCom when the enterprise network was very successfully penetrated by the well known intrusion specialist, Adrian Lamo. The first call that came from the now infamous CEO Bernie Ebbers was to shut off the corporate internet. It soon became apparent that with such an approach you might as well send the majority of the workforce home on indefinite leave.
“Unfortunately, I believe that the ‘Internet kill switch’ idea being kicked around by our ‘leaders’ is as meritorious as Bernie’s idea. Now for my cynical side… Maybe if such a kill switch comes to pass our current political leadership find themselves in a circumstance similar to Bernie’s current pickle.”
And finally, this from Jared Mauch, senior IP engineer at NTT America:
“For better or worse, companies will comply with lawful requests. In the event of U.S. civil unrest, I think it would be much harder than in other regimes to exert this type of control, and would cause a much broader global impact to economic activity. The same would happen with any pan-European ‘blackout.’
“For the economic reasons alone, I rate the chances of ‘kill-switch’ a zero. It makes for great reporting about power, but the practicality is zero.”
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