Klint Finley — who blogs at Technoccult, and writes regularly for ReadWriteWeb — has a great article over at ReadWriteWeb about creating a government-free Internet; the necessity of which is illuminated by recent events in Egypt, which include the government “shutting down the Internet.”
This happened in Egypt on Thursday Jan 27th; at 22:34 UTC the Egyptian Government effectively removed Egypt from the internet. Nearly all inbound and outbound connections to the web were shut down. The internet intelligence authority Renesys explains it here and confirms that “virtually all of Egypt’s Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide.” This has never happened before in the entire history of the internet, with a nation of this size. A block of this scale is completely unheard of, and Senator Joe Lieberman wants to be able to do the same thing in the US.
Yes this could happen here in the U.S., or in the UK, or in Australia, or anywhere else in the world.
Last year Senators Lieberman and Collins introduced a fairly far-reaching bill that would allow the US Government to shut down civilian access to the internet should a “Cybersecurity Emergency” arise, and keep it offline indefinitely. That version of the bill received some criticism though Lieberman continued to insist it was important.
Read the rest: 3 Projects to Create a Government-less Internet, and Why It’s Needed
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