[ Thanks to James
Maguire for this link. ]
“My first car had what is called a kill switch that I
put in shortly after I had bought it. I was living in LA at the
time, the capital of car thefts, and I even though it wasn’t all
that fancy a vehicle I wanted to make sure that it was somewhat
protected. It was a simple thing: you had to turn the headlights on
before you started the car. I thought I was in good shape until I
found out how many valets could figure out the sequence (in LA you
have to leave your car with valets a lot). This is a good analogy
for the same process when it comes time to turn off Internet access
to an entire country, whether it is for cybersecurity or
censorship. Someone clever will always figure out a way around the
blockade.“The idea to protect our own Internet access has been around for
some time, and various people have proposed that we do something
about it, including Senator Joe Lieberman.“The senator got his wish for a simple on/off switch for the
Internet, but it didn’t go down quite as he had planned when he
first proposed the idea before Congress last year. Early last
Friday just after midnight local time, the Egyptian telecoms
authority turned off almost all Internet and cell phone access to
its 80 million residents.”