Donald Trump may "turn off the internet" if elected, former staffer says
www.newsweek.com
Speaking on MSNBC, Miles Taylor, who worked in Trump's administration, outlined the potential threats of a second Trump term.

Sounds silly of course, and it is silly. But I thought it would be interesting to think it through. And with multiple minds.

How do you go about “turning off the internet” for a particular country? Because this is being attributed to Trump, I’m presuming that “turn off the internet” could mean a number of things.

Mess with DNS? Disable infrastructure? Buy out telecom?

Let’s say we’re committed to this task, how do we go about it? Let’s hear the crazy ideas

  • slazer2au@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    7 months ago

    From a technical POV you can’t. The US is too well connected with many subsea cables to Europe, South America, and Asia.

    https://www.submarinecablemap.com/

    In addition because the providers and cables are owned and operated by private companies the government would have a very hard time convincing telcos to do that.

    Hell even internally you can’t with every major city having 2 or 3 places where providers can connect with Google, Amazon, Facebook, Cloudflare, Akamai. Not to mention all the private peering locations.

    From a political POV, make legislation that says registered telcos must turn off telecommunications equipment connected to non US locations or black hole non us traffic when entering the country when requested by a government.

    • voracitude@lemmy.world
      6·
      7 months ago

      From a technical POV, have the Armed Forces drop depth charges on those cables where they cross our borders. Sure there would be legal challenges, but the damage would already be done, probably for years based on how prosecuting him for January 6th has gone.

      Ordering Amazon to turn off their servers (or more likely block all but government-approved connections) would result in about 70% of the internet going offline, even without cutting the cables. This can be accomplished with emergency powers.

      Poison or shut down US-based root DNS servers; also accomplishable with emergency powers, but the easiest to route around.

      Yes, this would all be a phenomenally stupid idea. New York City alone lost ten billion dollars per day while they were offline from Sandy. My job - hell, the entire company I work for - would evaporate instantly with no internet, and so would the livelihoods of most Americans. But this fucking guy doesn’t care about any of that. Don’t think the law will get in his way, don’t think fear for the country’s future will stop him. If the rest of the government allows him to be a candidate and he gets elected, despite the Fourteenth Amendment, the US is toast.

    • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
      4·
      7 months ago

      It would also completely fuck our critical infrastructure. There’s enough that needs connectivity for it to cascade to much more.