Last Week’s News: Internet Kill Switch

“This is especially true of our media. They are put out long before they are thought out. In fact, their being put outside us tends to cancel the possibility of their being thought of at all."

-- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964

Last week saw the announcement of a new US Senate bill that would give President Obama control over the Internet in emergency situations (See the Huffington Post article). US Senator Jay Rockefeller is a proponent of the bill, and wonders if the national security threat that the internet opens us up to is grave that “we would have been better off if we never invented the internet (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8PCmLPPVnA). The bill and Sen. Rockefeller’s support has a lot of people on the internet up in arms, but Sen. Rockefeller seems to be ignorant of the history of the internet. The web was not invented as a new medium to do business or to meet new friends on Facebook. Of, course, it does both of those things great.

The web started as ARPAnet, funded by the Department of Defense under the Advanced Research Project Agency. It began as a program to connect research at various universities and government research labs across the country, so that scientists and scholars could have easier access to information. The key difference between ARPAnet and any previous communications system is in the kind of network it creates. Radio, print, television and the like all depended on centralized networks to operate, meaning that all users connected to one central source of information. ARPAnet, and now the internet, function on a distributed network, meaning that there is no central host of information; if a connection is severed, information can easily be rerouted and still reach its final destination.

From a military perspective, this kind of communications network is much more robust. Though the Director of ARPA at the time of ARPAnet’s conception, Charles Herzefeld, assures us that the network “was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack,” it is very clear that this would be major motivation for funding from the Department of Defense. Even if this was not the intent from the beginning of the project, Herzfeld notes that the military applications were in their minds, and were later developed in conjunction with the Air Force.

The most significant benefit of a distributed network for military purposes is there is no central communications infrastructure that can be destroyed to wipe out information or communications between cities. It is easily seen that an attack on a radio tower would terminate any communications being transmitted from that tower and leave those it served in the dark. The existence of something like ARPAnet makes a centralized attack like that obsolete, but it also makes necessary a new kind of attack.

Now, back to Sen. Rockefeller’s remark: “Would we be better off if we never invented the internet?” Well, it is a actually a good question to think about. In terms of military power and vulnerability, how well does the internet serve us? Clearly, the terrorist attacks that Rockefeller and Lieberman fear are a product of the internet, but its invention obsolesced the kind of centralized attack that was so feared during the Cold War. Could we have foreseen this development?