Source: Time
During Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate, frontrunner Donald Trump doubled down on his call for “closing off parts of the Internet” in order to stymie terrorist groups’ online recruitment efforts. “I would certainly be open to closing areas where we are at war with somebody,” Trump said, referring to the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria, or ISIS. “I sure as hell don’t want to let people that want to kill us and kill our nation use our Internet.”
It was at least the second time in recent weeks that Trump has talked about limiting ISIS’ Internet access in some capacity. The real estate magnate wants to enlist Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Silicon Valley companies to “figure out a way that ISIS can’t do what they’re doing.” Trump’s exact intent is unclear; a Trump spokeswoman did not respond to a request for further explanation.
But legal and technology experts say that a President Trump would have little power to control how the Internet operates, or who can access it.
To understand why Trump can’t “close off” the Internet, it’s important to know how the Internet works. Simply put, the Internet is a complex combination of servers, routers and endpoint devices (like your computer or smartphone) that communicate with each other to transfer data from one location to another. A patchwork of international organizations decide Internet procedures like assigning domain names, while individual countries establish laws for what content can be accessed within their borders. And yes, it’s true that the U.S. Department of Defense played a key role in developing what became the Internet, but the American government doesn’t control it today.
“The Internet is designed to be decentralized,” says Andy Sellars, a staff attorney for the Digital Media Law Project housed at Harvard University. “It’s designed to be that no single power could deny its use. That’s served the Internet quite well because it’s allowed it to grow in unexpected ways.”
Without such a switch, Trump would have to convince others to help him close off the Internet. Preventing ISIS operatives abroad from going online at all would be impossible — the group already controls Internet infrastructure in its territory; it has used this power to ban some citizens from getting online. Even if Trump somehow convinced a head of state to cut off their country’s Internet in the name of security, the move would overwhelmingly affect people unassociated with ISIS. “It would be a human rights catastrophe,” says Thomas Ristenpart, a computer science professor at Cornell University.
Categories: America, Technology, The Muslim Times, War On Terror
He could, however, stop them from reaching US sites and users and could keep US residents from reaching sites and servers, both in enemy nations and those that are hosted elsewhere but allow terrorists access. It’s a simple change to the routing tables on the MAE routers farm to Null0 for certain IPs and IP Blocks. Core DNS changes could be done as well.