Replies

hey Jack,

firstly, some of the stuff below is for all reading this and i in no way am trying to insult your intelligence so please dont misread what i am saying here, it is meant as an interest piece for readers here.

is it possible to ‘bring the internet down’ other than power outages, actually it would be possible. easy no, impossible, nope. but first a little clarification on wording.

its best to clarify here, if by internet you mean the server backbone that services like the web runs on then that is very difficult to disrupt. most people mix the web and the internet. technically they are 2 different beasts. the web ‘runs on’ the internet backbone. shutting ‘the internet down’ would require shutting servers (or denial attacks) down and as you rightly say power outages over a long period of time would be a way of doing that.

you could cause a lot of serious disruption by simply getting behemoth companies like microsoft, apple and google to redirect traffic (and they are both closely integrated into the US government already - well the liberal part at least). if any of these companies was told by the US to ‘stop’ i can guarantee you they would. on a related note in 2010 sen liebermann wanted a internet kill switch bill in congress created for presidential access. not sure how far that went tbh.

for the average user you could quite easily disrupt access. there is 100 to 200 root zone servers situated in hiddenish locations across the globe controlled by a independent org called ICANN. think of these servers as the central source of truth and all info is propagated from them (okay thats a simplification but stay with me). so when you contact a website the text you write is checked against a domain name server for the real address. if you wanted to ‘blind’ a population rerouting these addresses to the point that they never reply would be possible to do. also i would bet a huge percentage of people are pointing their browsers to googles’s dns servers (8.8.8.8), so interfering even at that level would screw up a lot of access. the vast bulk of people have no idea even how to change their dns server address or even what they are.

so by way of example what port number does our inbound email work on, your outbound port number? imagine microsoft, apple, and google closed these ports? email outages for the vast majority of the country would close. by changing 2 areas, email and browsing is down. (it would not be easy but it is definitely doable). another way would be to disable to login server verification process that checks your pwd. if you always got that to send a ‘fail’ notification, you could never login.

so if you wanted to ‘shut it down’ by simply interfering in the core companies would mean a huge swathe of people would suddenly be left with devices that wont ‘work’. lets be honest the average consumer has not a clue how this works...it just does..and they will use that ignorance to control.
in the US the govt has the ability to stop tv transmissions, they can control phones and in most countries even ham radio’s are registered (i.e. they know who and where you are). im not saying this is easy but governments definitely have that ability. its frequently done in dodgier parts of the world. recently turkey ‘killed’ social media access if i recall and so did (is) Iran not to mention chinas own ‘firewall’.

you would not need to shut it down, you can redirect to a server you control. a ‘mini me’ version of this is happening already with conservatives blocked on youtube, twitter, facebook as we speak.

so the definition of shutting the internet down needs to be considered. imagine you typed freerepublic.com and the CNN homepage appeared. imagine all of a sudden all the websites you use for alt-news...gets redirected. sure you could put in the ip address of free republic but how many here know it, i sure dont. will there be an underground, yep, in fact you would probably see the darknet take on a whole new interest. the issue is that is probably, what, say 3-5 % of the population at best.

its not something that would be easy of cheap...but it is doable.

just my opinion.

I very much appreciate all the detailed analysis on "shutting down the internet" that you did. I have no criticism of your analysis, it seems spot on.

Going back to Neon Revolt's column, he expects the internet to be shut down, so if we use your categories, I can say that I do not expect any of these to happen:

getting behemoth companies like microsoft, apple and google to redirect traffic
denying access or rerouting via the 100 to 200 root zone servers situated in hiddenish locations across the globe
large email services shut down email by turning off TCP/IP ports
Google changing the address of their DNS server

And I expect this to continue

a ‘mini me’ version of this is happening already with conservatives blocked on youtube, twitter, facebook as we speak.

I guess we will see what we see. Certainly any of the large scale disruptive actions undertaken by our own government would be an incredible proof of the fundamental rightness of Q's claims.

But as I said, I don't think any of that's going to happen.

I think it would be possible to sabotage the Internet via the fiber optic backbone.

During the Vietnam War there was a significant mathematical analysis devoted to “breaking networks” by removing the smallest possible number of strategically placed links. Rand Corporation performed such studies and developed (and published) the “Max Flow Min Cut Theorem.” I think it may have been intended to determine where to bomb the Ho Chi Minh Trail—bridges and so on.

Anyway, if someone had a full Fiber Optic map (not easy to come by, by the way) it would be possible to determine points of attack to take down not only the Internet but telephone and cellular service as well. They all travel the fiber optic backbone.

An this is without necessarily even touching the big hubs for switching and cross-connection located in a number of major cities.