In addition to all of the technical problems, this remains a little bit of a cat-and-mouse game. I have seen the same reporting that you have, describing internet shutdowns across the country. One was characterized as specifically preventing certain people and certain groups from rallying support and reaching outside of the borders. Any time you see a government—or a group, in the case of the Taliban—expressing autocratic, authoritarian, and repressive views, it follows that they might do what they say they want to do, which is restrict access to information and communication.
Making sure that people there have access to information, the ability to communicate, and the ability to get the news is essential.
And that varies: it varies country by country, and it varies over time. That is part of three simultaneous trends. First, you have the increasing frequency of internet shutdowns.
Second, you have the increased attention by governments to how they control telecommunications infrastructure in their countries. And you also see a recession of democracy around the world, and an increase in autocratic governments exerting power over civil society.
I think as more people are living their lives online and as democratic institutions increasingly rely on the internet as a way to facilitate civic participation—to share news and information, for people to communicate with each other, and for people to organize—the risk of a government shutting down the internet carries increasing costs. It depends a lot on your circumstances.
There are a number of tools that can allow you to access the free and open internet—virtual private networks VPNs , for example. There are certain tools that allow you to protect yourself from specific kinds of censorship. We have a tool called Intra and there are other tools, too that protect users and allow them to circumvent those restrictions.
It's certainly a matter of livelihoods lost—of civil society being restricted, access to information being restricted, and freedom of expression being curtailed. I think limitations on the free and open internet anywhere pose a risk to us everywhere.
A public conversation is an important first step. When governments get together to discuss the norms of behavior and what is to become of the future of the internet, we hope that this is an item on the agenda.
It represents a threat to freedom and, indeed, to security that seems to be increasing. If one of those costs of shutting down the internet is that it alienates you from the broader community of nations, that would be a step in the right direction. What could be more fundamental to how people get information, express themselves, organize, communicate, and live their daily lives? The internet has been one of the greatest boons to human freedom in the history of our species.
Some countries just filter web access dramatically, even sometimes to the degree of stopping access to Google search. Here in the Western world we have much less chance of this occurring, with many countries having legislation in place regarding this issue. This could mean ordering specific computers, networks or websites to be disconnected from the Internet, this is currently on the Senate legislative calendar. Many other Western countries have similar legislation more focused on filtering, France for example have the Loppsi Act which blacklists certain sites.
But in theory, if the world wide co-operation of ISPs was there and the legislation ignored, then the world could sink into an age of the internet blackout, where the internet capabilities of new devices null and void, and the world of Twitter and cat pictures decimated. With our freedom of speech and other rights so strongly upheld you can Google, stream, share and do whatever you want without concern of the web shutting down.
The Fact Site requires you to enable Javascript to browse our website. This led to a major outage. Unfortunately these routes leaked outside of Pakistan and led to large portions of the internet sending their YouTube request traffic to Pakistan Telecom, denying service. The key problem with BGP is the lack of authentication for where an advertisement originates or of the path being advertised. Solutions have been proposed in the past using cryptography to assure the integrity of advertisements but they have met with limited success operationally for a large variety of factors including computational overhead on already-strained gateway routers, the need for centralized trust, and the need for changing protocols on routers around the globe to handle this new security information.
If BGP was systematically attacked by a determined adversary to cause similar routing shutdowns, the internet as a whole could fully shut down. If it had to bootstrap from scratch, there is no guarantee that it would actually reconverge. To ensure that we never have to test this in practice, a dedicated group of network operators around the world vigilantly checks the state of internet routing.
This first line of human-scale defense has been instrumental in preventing catastrophic failure of the global internet. The internet is designed as a massive distributed network with no single party having total control. Fragmenting the internet breaking it down into detached networks would be the more likely result of an attempt.
DDOS Distributed Denial of Service attacks on this have already occurred and caused significant outages in the last few years. As DNS is implemented across various platforms, a universal 0-day is unlikely to completely disable this globally. There are some very old protocols here that could be vulnerable to a well researched attack although they have stood the test of time. Physical: Cutting undersea cables combined with satellite jamming could cause continents to lose connectivity to each other and even fragment communications internally.
An electromagnetic pulse EMP can also disable electronics at range quite effectively. While unlikely outside of wartime, this is probably the most effective way to shutdown the internet within a large, but specific region. TLDR: targeted physical attacks at key locations and choke-points could potentially disable the internet at a large scale. Some of the smartest minds in technology and science are constantly looking at new ways to add redundancy and increase resilience for the internet.
This would be similar to disrupting automotive traffic by damaging major highways all around the world. It would stop or slow long distance communication, which is much more common on the internet than long distance travel is on roads. This would be massively disruptive, but large parts of the internet would still be able to communicate locally. Flooding networks on the internet with traffic is another strategy.
This would be like trying to clog up all the roads with extra cars. The problem both in the internet and real world is that it would be hard to both transmit enough traffic and to do so in all of the right areas simultaneously.
Network operators would notice and block such traffic quickly perhaps in an automated way , as they are accustomed to seeing this sort of attack traffic already. So this is not likely to be an effective way to shut down the Internet.
So, while this would break programs that use DNS, many aspects of the internet would function just fine. This serves somewhat like Google Maps that tells data on the network how to get from point A to point B.
While it is possible to disrupt this for parts of the internet, it is hard to disrupt routing for computers that are far away from where you are attacking. A common way to disrupt traffic is to say that you have a fast perhaps instant way to get to an address. However, if someone is far away, just getting to you will take them longer than to go to the legitimate way.
Even if they had a lot of computers able to do this around the world, the issues would still only be localized to some extent. So this also would cause only partial disruption. Even a social movement which tried to ban the internet and had people try to rip out infrastructure may not have great effect.
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