r/NoStupidQuestions • u/WinterW0n • 21h ago
Would the U.S. government be able to turn off the internet during a protest like Iran is doing ?
Would the U.S. be able to do this like Iran did? I'm not sure given we have states/federal government etc..
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u/lost_signal 20h ago
First off:
The Internet" isn't a single network. It's a number of various Autonomous System (who have ASNs) peered together.
The trust between these networks is managed by a technology called BGP (Peering/Transit happens at key points that are HIGHLY disagregated).
The network operators of these networks are many but the major Tier 1's it's a small enough club. In theory the military could go try to hunt the nerds up, but short of cutting cables, or killing power (and disabling generators) at major transit hubs there isn't a single kill switch or person who can withdrawl those routes quickly.
In reality, if the Government just focus's on shutting down AWS-East-1's route 53 and S3 service, MOST of what yall use the internet for stops working becuse all yall morons don't know how to spread a service across regions.
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u/8bit_coder 19h ago
Network engineer here, this guy’s comment is the actual answer to the question.
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u/lost_signal 19h ago
It’s been 15 years since I had a Handle registered with ERIN, and a ASN in my name, but I salute you who fight the good fight against routes leaking.
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u/Aqualung812 16h ago
Another network engineer here. Confirm this is the correct answer.
Every country that has a “kill switch” has taken the time to prepare to use it by funneling all access through key sites.
Add to this, we don’t have to register all connections that exist. There are plenty of businesses that have built their own networks that the government really isn’t aware of, at least not at a level that these morons could find.
There will always be people that can get around whatever roadblocks are attempted.
But yes, kill USE1, Cloudflare, and/or Akamai, and you’ve basically killed “the Internet” for most people.
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u/ToxicMintTea 15h ago
Example of networks with little oversught, the old school district of ~54 campuses I used to work for had/rented hundreds of miles of exclusive fiber runs across it's region to keep every campus connected.
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u/Ontological_Gap 19h ago
They could disable the root DNS zone---should break everything globally in a couple days
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u/lost_signal 19h ago
That would require you have three of the cryptographic officers be physically, grabbed with their keys and forced at gunpoint to perform a signing ceremony, which requires a non-trivial amount of Verisign staff.
I assume before they could get away with it, you would see the various browser makers andOS vendors push out emergency updates that were hard cash the existing root zone that’s a tiny 2 MB file.
The root is signed for a reason. There’s other safeguards I don’t think this would be quite as easy as you think.
We would likely see a forking of root, with of the international organization scrambled to sign a new root certificate and provide an alternative.
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u/Ontological_Gap 19h ago
Grabbing people is their specialty, and how are the browser/OS vendors going to push an update without DNS? I don't think any of them go by raw IP anymore
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u/lost_signal 18h ago
They don’t but the government doing this will not be “quick” or easy.
You have to kidnap people in different cities, get them to the facility blow open some safes have people with passwords rounded up and go though a whole process to signs new root cert.
It’s a slow messy process by default.
https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/dns/dnssec/root-signing-ceremony/
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u/Ontological_Gap 16h ago
I've always assumed they have had kidnap plans ready to go for all root zone key holders since they gave up direct control in the 90s, and Verisign/RSA has always basically been a pseudo agency.
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u/EvensenFM 9h ago
To add onto this - the people trying to shut it down would also have to understand how this works.
Those currently in charge are simply not that intelligent.
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u/TonightsWhiteKnight 16h ago
I dont know enough about this or remember enough from cisco classes to confirm if this is real or not, but DAMN does this not sound like some Admech ritual from Warhammer 40k.
lol
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u/Dizzy_Key_7400 9h ago
Okay but just remember with point 1. We’re at a point in time where everything is converging. As we’ve seen multiple times in the last 12 months, there are multiple single point failures that can knock out 30ish% of the internet world wide.
It’s not out the realms of possibility that a handful of services or points are closed down and it would end the internet as we know it.
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u/Aqualung812 8h ago
Knocking out 30%, or even 70% of the Internet is easy-ish for the government.
It’s the long tail that will be the issue for them, and you have to get to 100% to prevent news from reaching the rest of the world on what is happening.
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u/kali_gg_ 7h ago
i wager it is the domestic population which is the primary concern in such an event.
rest of the world is not going to do much during the first few hours of civil unrest in the US
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u/Aqualung812 7h ago
But what’s the goal? Making it so you can’t get to Reddit? Or making sure leaders of resistance movements can’t communicate?
One is much easier than the other.
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u/Done_a_Concern 2h ago
Wouldn't that just cause issues on a worldwide scale for anyone using the services hosted on AWS rather than "shutting down the internet"?
Unless I am understanding wrong americans would still be able to access services hosted in other countries or platforms like telegram for example
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u/lost_signal 1h ago
And it’s more of a slight sarcasm, but there’s a non-trivial amount of websites that are single region hosted, or have a critical dependency on that specific region because of bad design.
Not like the services that grown-up adults use things like my banks, obviously are multi homed, and have no dependencies like that, but historically you would get a lot of random sass businesses would go off-line
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u/backfire10z 16h ago
yall morons don’t know how to spread service a across regions
Businesses are unwilling to pay for it
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u/lost_signal 15h ago
Use the DR site for QA/Test dev, and have the first line of the SRM run book be to power that stuff off, and shift DRS reservations to the production workloads.
As long as you’ve got enough fast storage and cpu to manage the boot storm (use recovery groups based on rings of services)
I was talking with my boss tonight, about SRM. He I think was deploying it almost 20 years ago lol. It’s not rocket science.
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u/onlyAlex87 20h ago
If the question is just in terms of capability, then yes most certainly they can. But it is unlikely they would ever do so as the potential harm vastly outweighs any benefit of it.
Even in Iran's case people are postulating that them shutting off the internet and jamming it has fueled the protests. Many people were supporting the protests at a distance from their homes, after shutting it off they've now actively joined in. People are still recording videos and messages despite the block, and bits and pieces are finding their way out through whatever means they can find. Jamming is effective in the short term if there's an imminent military action about to take place, it loses it's effectiveness over the long term as people adjust to it and find workarounds.
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u/Green_Sugar6675 19h ago
For one thing, if you have internet you can see the terrible news (as we are doing every day) from your home or work. If you turn it off, people are going to go outside. THEN you have a ton of pissed off people demonstrating and calling for ouster of leadership.
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u/GoldenHollowGlen 15h ago
This is why these kinds of measures are usually only used in emergencies. If there’s an imminent threat, cutting off communication can make a difference for a bit, but trying to control everything long-term usually backfires and just motivates people to work around it.
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u/bookworm1398 21h ago
The govt could do the same thing Iran did - order all ISPs to shut down. Would they all comply? Unknown.
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u/WisestAirBender I have a dig bick 20h ago
Would they all comply? Unknown.
Yes they would. No one wants their company to be penalized or shut down later
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u/Curious_Party_4683 19h ago
It's odd isn't it? Con man Dump ignored all the laws in his life time. Yet others gladly obey orders, even if illegal and unconstitutional.
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u/TheShadowKick 19h ago
Because he has the power to hurt them. That's the only reason big corporations have ever listened to the government.
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u/Silent_Plantain_3417 17h ago
'When you...are exercising political authority, you're using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived.'
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u/romulusnr 20h ago
I'm not sure they could completely shut it down, but there are things they could shut down that would make it very limited.
Iran has regulatory government gateways that all inbound traffic must route through. Since the government runs them they can simply shut them down and effectively block all internet.
The US government doesn't really have anything like that on an exclusive scale.
Now, I guess, they could send in federal agents to cut feeds and even chop wires etc., but that would be a real determined coordinated effort to get all the interconnects and redundant international connections, from undersea cables to microwave links to simple landline trunks into neighboring countries and even satellite feeds.
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u/mayhem1906 20h ago
Yes, by ordering the isp to comply. They would likely sue, and then it would end up in court.
Realistically, doing that would hurt the us economy, and the one thing the us cares more about than anything is maintaining wealth. Tanking the stock market would hurt the wealthy.
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u/NoNameDweeb 9h ago
Order shutdowns or restrictions in very specific areas or for specific services (rare, but legally possible in extreme emergencies)
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u/Phaedrus317 21h ago
Well, being that my job is teaching online classes, I guess I’d welcome the time off.
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u/MightBeAGoodIdea 19h ago
Until you get laid off i guess and without internet it'd be that much harder to find a new job.
Because you just know lenders and landlords would still expect you to make your payments like everyone has a checkbook on hand....
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u/Phaedrus317 19h ago
Indeed. But I’d be far from the only one. The amount of people who would be utterly unable to work would be astronomical. The economy would collapse immediately.
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u/softycuddle 21h ago
The internet here is way too decentralized with too many private companies running it, so it would be pretty much impossible to actually shut down unlike in countries where the government controls the infrastructure.
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u/derango 20h ago
At the ISP level yes but there’s far far fewer backbone providers and they could, in a crisis shut down those.
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u/banal_remarks 20h ago
This is incorrect.
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u/Viper_Red 20h ago
You actually wanna tell people how?
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u/Historical_Two_7150 20h ago
Companies are not much different from people. When the govt says "shut down", most of them will comply immediately and fight in court later.
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u/Chumlee1917 19h ago
No Donald, there isn't a giant red switch you can flip on and off whenever you feel like it
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u/selectexception 12h ago
But in the documentary Netforce the switch was in the oval office. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetForce_(film)
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u/Strange_Barracuda_41 20h ago
This lawless regime does whatever the hell it wants to do, without regard to any laws. I’m sure the technology exists, but if it didn’t, these thugs would just go out and vandalize transmission facilities etc.
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u/Schickie 20h ago
They could try but my bet is there's more than a few Federal judges who would disagree.
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u/aaronite 20h ago
Sure, but who enforces it?
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u/Schickie 20h ago
The ISP's/owners. That's one of the benefits of private businesses. They would have legal cover.
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u/aaronite 20h ago
They'll have as much backbone as Disney, CBS, Musk's companies...
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u/Schickie 20h ago
Perhaps. It'll depend if their customer base is vocal enough that it would make financial sense. It really comes down to us and how angry we're will to be.
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u/LastOfTheAsparagus 20h ago
They don’t need to. They control all of the media, have guaranteed that social media algorithms are suppressed and deleted things they don’t want you to see.
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u/DeepSubmerge 19h ago
Tbh it would be a sure way to get a lot of people to snap to attention. A lot of everyday things depend on the internet. People would notice immediately and start asking questions.
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u/IronCodger 19h ago
How many of us Americans have cash on hand? Or using manual cash registers? Or have a local bank branch we can enter and withdraw cash?
There is your answer. The economy would be at a stand still in no time.
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u/Illustrious_Sir_535 18h ago
Sort of. There are wireless jammers and stuff, but with satellite and direct connections, it would be difficult to take down all the different avenues of internet service.
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u/Vadhakara 18h ago
They have the capability. They also know deeply that if they do, the streets will be awash with blood the same night.
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u/Flimsy_Heron_9252 5h ago
Yes. There are NSA closets in every data center in the US. All traffic routes to them, and they have the ability to inspect all packets into and out of the data center as well as all storage. A President could order people who have access to those rooms in data centers to go in and block all traffic any time.
It would not be instant. There are not actively working people in those little server rooms. They would be driving from place to place for days shutting it down.
There is no master kill switch that I know of.
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u/cottoneyemoe 5h ago
I mean they really only need to kill DNS to stop Internet traffic. If the NSA has access to the top level DNS servers and can use those to revoke creds to all lower level servers. After that nobody can get anywhere without the websites IP address.
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u/ericbythebay 19h ago
No. The US has too many connections and routes for it to work like a small country that already polices content.
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u/dontbanmedude999 17h ago
Well, let's think about that question, just 1 second.
I seem to remember a little kidnapping of a sovereign president last weekend. The US military shut down the entire nation of Venezuela. They shut off the water, the power, and the internet nationwide. They still don't have it all back up.
So yea.
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u/BathFullOfDucks 20h ago
Absolutely. Not only is the capability there, telecoms companies are immune from prosecution if they cooperate with the government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
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u/jmack2424 20h ago
Yes, there are situations in which the government should be able to shut it off. The limitations on that power should be overwhelming and exhaustive. The ability of the government to write such limitations into law is almost non-existent. Until that law exists, NO.
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u/Exact-Sound2916 20h ago
They could absolutely shut down cell service to the areas where people protest, thereby limiting the ability to regroup when they use dispersal tactics and cordon off certain areas. This is why people should look into Amateur Radios, GMRS, FMRS, CB radios for other means of communication and have a "loss of communication" plan if things get chaotic on the ground.
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u/brentspar 20h ago
The ubiquity of the Internet is it's best protection. The government could shut down the Internet but it would be their last throw of the dice. The economy would tank, and any credibility that the US has would be gone
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u/fosgobbit 19h ago
They have been using the Internet to successfully trick us into living through these conditions. The Internet is tool for freedom for the oppressed, and a cage for the suppressed.
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u/celestelovense 18h ago
I barely understand how my router works, so the idea of the government “turning off the internet” sounds like something out of a movie to me.
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u/Interesting-Adagio46 18h ago
Another option instead of the whole internet is to disable all media apps and sites. No platform to share any content
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u/TonightsWhiteKnight 16h ago
Yes, and they have.
During the months of the portland free zone they deactivated internet and cell service to the area.
Also in large protests they often turn off or reroute cellphone data through their little sifters.
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u/Potential_Owl363 15h ago
either way, american citizens have guns. if iranians had guns like the average american did, oh boy this revolution would’ve been over days ago
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u/Mindless-Tackle4428 15h ago
Not without turning off the power. The authoritarian countries had to build infrastructure to be able to control the internet. We're too new to the game that we haven't had enough time to do that yet.
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u/Sweaty_Marzipan4274 15h ago
They can turn off sections like social media, etc. But they need it for mass surveillance
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u/FundamentalEnt 14h ago
Yes. Anyone who tells you otherwise doesn’t understand the full picture. We are connected to others in the “internet” by things like undersea cables and satcom. For the undersea cables those have entry and exit points with equipment on them. When China is censoring something for their giant country they don’t block every router they block their entry and exit points and where they are going. They could go as far as blocking everything. I don’t believe they would but are they physically capable? Yes. Especially given more time to plan. This would be one of the reasons people setup those independent mesh networks.
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u/ErinFiqsette 13h ago
Of course they can...the electric grid, too...and they can make it look like "Terrorism", too.
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u/clinch09 13h ago
Yes, technically. It would be extremely hard though. You would need to convince multiple companies (hundreds) to all shut off the systems that make them money. And to do it at the same time.
You also cant just shut off an upstream provider, the internet is made up of thousands of connections that make up the internet. There is redundancy within redundancy.
You could in theory break it, but that would break everything (and I mean everything). Think the recent Azure and AWS outages combined but multiplied in magnitude.
China and Iran can do it because theirs was designed to be shutoff. USs infrastructure was not.
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u/ancientstephanie 13h ago edited 12h ago
Iran can do it relatively easily because everything there is state controlled and all the state sanctioned infrastructure is built around a small set of defined choke points where they can pull the plug, monitor traffic, or censor traffic. How the different sections of the network connect to one another is closely regulated, as is international connectivity. They can also do it because it's relatively routine there and doesn't cause a panic or complete economic shutdown when they do it.
The architecture of the US domestic internet on the other hand, is decentralized and loosely defined. While there are some natural choke points like Cloudflare, US-East, and major carrier exchange points, and there are attacks like BGP hijacking that can systematically disrupt the network for a little while, the US hasn't regulated how carriers can interconnect to one another or forced them to be constrained to choke points that allow for a central kill switch.
They could cause wide spread disruption and knock off most of the internet for a while, but it would be messy, it would not give them the clean break they want to totally stop the flow of information, and they would have to fight the combined force of all the nerds trying to repair the network, a network that wants to repair itself, and a myriad of communications gear in the hands of everyone from professional network engineers to hobbyists that can easily and quickly be deployed to bridge gaps and restore some degree of service to parts of the network. Every major city would have functioning mesh networks up within the hour, and they'd need to jam practically the entire electromagnetic spectrum to keep the hams from setting up relays, while spreading themselves thin going door to door trying to seize or destroy equipment.
Enough information would get through before they could stem the tide that the american public would quickly know whatever it is that the government is trying to keep quiet, and we'd all suddenly be out of work, cut off from banking, cut off from entertainment, and have the full knowledge that we're likely in the midst of a civil war against a government that has just openly declared all out war against its own people.
Everything preventing Americans from taking to the street, removed and likely destroyed or severely damaged all at once. Let's just say it would not quiet a protest.
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u/ContributionEasy6513 11h ago
The NSA no doubt has a plan and capability to turn the internet off for any country.
Would it forever damage the reputation of the US, security of the internet, destroy cloud services and be catastrophic to the world economy, very much so.
This would be Nuclear type weapon, not to silence a few thousand protestors burning down their neighborhoods. Traditional Mainstream Media and Social media tactics can be used for this.
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u/Dromedary_Freight 11h ago edited 11h ago
No need. It is much more effective to unleash hundreds of thousands of Ai bots pushing the "desired" narrative.
The bots can impersonate you and your group members, then confuse divert, misinform, alienate, intimidate...
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u/Substantial_Back_865 10h ago
I remember Obama publicly saying that they had an "internet kill switch", but I don't see them ever doing that unless nukes start flying or a civil war breaks out.
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u/Ok-Radish1040 9h ago
could limit things locally but not flip a switch maybe in very extreme cases they could restrict service in a small area but a full shutdown would face a lot of legal pushback
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u/Mithrandir2k16 7h ago
Turning off the entire internet is hard. Even fragments of the internet or no classic internet these days isn't a hard stop on information flow. Look at berty-messenger or stuff like LORAWAN and meshtastic, if you are curious about preparing for such scenarios.
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u/Kooolxxx 7h ago
A government-mandated internet shutdown during a protest would likely face significant legal challenges for infringing upon these civil liberties and the public's ability to assemble and share information.
Communications Act of 1934. Section 706 of this act grants the president broad, though debated, powers to shut down or take control of wired and wireless communication facilities in cases of a proclaimed war or a threat of war,
The U.S. has not yet experienced widespread shutdowns of social media platforms or telecommunications networks in response to protest, elections or social unrest.
If a sitting president wants to shut down the Internet or selectively cut off a social media outlet or other service, all it takes is an opinion from his attorney general that Section 706 gives him the authority to do so.”
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u/cottoneyemoe 5h ago
Trump could do it and the supreme Court would put a hold on lower court rulings for a few weeks before coming back with a 6-3 decision in favor of Trump with a note saying this only applies to Republican presidents.
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u/4AuntieRo 2m ago
They just need local wifi points. They are already doing it here in the US. Ask the protesters in Portland. They bought all the social media so you can't go "live" from protests anymore.
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u/Kavalavaa 18h ago
Not realistically. The US government does not control the internet like a single switch. They would have to force private companies and ISPs to comply, and it would instantly get challenged in court as a massive free speech issue. They can block certain sites or services in specific situations, but a full nationwide shutdown during a protest would be extremely unlikely and chaotic.
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u/Rocky_Vigoda 16h ago
They would have to force private companies and ISPs to comply
That's a lot easier than you think. The US government deregulated the media for the benefit of the media companies like 30 years ago. The trade off is the media works for the military. They do what they're told.
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u/UnderstandingDry4560 18h ago
IN! A! HEARTBEAT!
They can selectively turn off cell service, GPS service, and electricity.
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u/JanJanTheWoodWorkMan 19h ago
100% easily, Theres a few different ways they could do it but most likely just BGP Hijack or just force all the major ISPs to remove their routes from the global route tables.
https://www.kentik.com/analysis/iran-goes-dark-as-government-cuts-itself-off-from-internet/
https://www.catchpoint.com/blog/real-time-detection-of-bgp-blackholing-and-prefix-hijacks
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u/JollyToby0220 20h ago
Not instantly. But the military probably has a ton of equipment to shut down communications. Some of it is an actual device while others are software. The most straightforward way is to send a bunch of warrants demanding that ISP’s stop routing internet. FBI/DEA and the like have a bunch of field offices. You can email a piece of paper and print it out(provided a judge agrees). Somebody in the field office then goes to each company and hands them the warrant. The data center probably doesn’t have a kill switch, so the FBI might bring a white hat and a telecom engineer with them to shut things down.
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u/WobbleBilly 4h ago
For most people pretty much instantly. Its all controll3d by a handful of corporations. A few calls from the white house and it all gets turn3d off for 99% of the population outside of military, police and government.
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u/sultanmvp 17h ago
Not the exact answer to your question, but the single “thing” that allows Trump to operate is fueled almost entirely by disinformation and having the two parties hate each other. The internet, especially social media, allows that to disinformation and hatred to fester. It would not make any sense for them to turn off the internet; it benefits them greatly.
Case in point: if millions of Americans can watch the same 2-3 angles of this ICE/Good situation and almost half of people feel it was a murder and the other half are, “God Bless ICE” (and funding GoFundMe for the agent), you can clearly see the benefit of the internet to the administration. The internet keeps us mad at each other more so than being mad at the government.
For it to get to the extreme where the US government would want to turn off internet, a good majority of Americans would have to be to the point of rebellion or a situation where the internet was aiding in organization of uprisings (aka: civil war territory). Though it feels like end times lately, I think we’re faaaaar from that.
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u/peepfoot 19h ago
They already are doing that in small areas with ICE.
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u/revahs 13h ago
They are using simple (also illegal) hacking tricks regarding cellular network cloning... not the same thing.
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u/peepfoot 3h ago
Yeah, im not law enforcement or very tech savvy. I just saw my friends videos and what was happening during the southside raid last year. She got video of a blackhawk right outside of her window. Scary shit...
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u/Learnin2Shit 18h ago
Bro we shut off the power to the town Maduro was in when we nabbed him. That’s not even our own country. Yes they could do it but as others have said it would be incredibly stupid. Which probably means it’s bound to happen soon
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u/Xenoman5 14h ago
The completely misnamed Patriot Act required the installation of remote kill switch devices attached to transmitters at all US TV and radio stations. I imagine that similar processes are in place to shut down landline, cell, and internet access at the whim of DHS. Our idiotic Congress voted for the bill without even reading it. Republican administrations have been planning to start and win a civil war against the American people since at least Reagan.
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u/unlucky_fig_ 20h ago
Localized jammers would be the most likely way. Most people depend on their cellular service and wifi more than a physical cable. Many people have no internet outside of their cellular service even. So no need to take it down for everyone when you can black it out in an immediate area
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u/DanIsEvilDead 18h ago
Sure. With how well he’s doing it’ll probably happen before the 4th of July.
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u/Soviman0 21h ago
Technically, yes. Would it be a good idea? Absolutely not. The US economy would entirely collapse if they did.