It seems to me that a big part of the problem with fighting terror is the enemies’ ability to communicate propaganda, explosives technology and strategems to a worldwide audience all the while relatively safe from exposure.
I recall that the GPS system is subject to military control. Can the US government shut down the world wide web ?
I’m pretty sure that that would require either controlling *all * of the servers in the country, or all of the connections. Ain’t gonna happen, not with the level of freedom that we still enjoy.
Only Al Gore has the power to shut down the internet. (What the maker giveth, he taketh away.) 
The WWW isn’t like GPS. GPS depends on a rather small number of government controlled satellites to function. The WWW is basically a set of ideas really. It is fundamentally a set of standards that computers all over the globe used to communicate by. It isn’t possible for anyone to shut it down. The system was designed to be fail-safe so that even if parts of it went down, all the traffic will dynamically re-route itself and the network as a whole will still work.
The closest thing there is to centralization on the web is the top-level domain name servers. There are a finite number spread across the globe and they translate domain names (e.g. www.straightdope.com) into the IP address (a number) that the routers actually use to send traffic there. The domain servers are spread across the globe however and taking them down doesn’t actually cripple the web. You can still use the numbers to reach web sites.
bit of a side note, but one of the distinguishing characteristics of TCP/IP, the networking protocols underlying the internet, is that they’re very good at keeping a network operative even when a fairly high number of the servers and links have been shut down or made inoperative. I remember reading a slight mention in one of my Unix textbooks about how the Iraq military network in operation desert storm was able to stay afloat even during the bombing, because somebody from one of the coalition countries had sold Hussein TCP/IP server software a few years before.
Though I take that with a few grains of salt.
Could Bush even use the internet ?
IIRC the original idea behind the internet was a US government one. They were looking for a communications system that could survive a nuclear attack such that even if large chunks of it were taken out it would still work. On the back of that the internet grew.
That said I assume there are only so many communications satellites and trans-oceanic cables that route communications traffic to other countries. Perhaps if the government grabbed those chokepoints they could disable at least international communications. Of course, massive amounts of legitimate business is conducted via these channels and if they were shut down there would be hell to pay.
It was Arpanet
This handy-dandy Atlas of Cyberspace looks like it has a lot of information on the phsyical layout of the global telecommunications network, including satellites & oceanic cables.
I suppose as a strict GQ answer, GWB could hypothetically shut down the Internet. He has access to enough nuclear weaponry to cause a human-extinction-level event to occur, and even the sad TCP/IP pinging of any servers and routes that might survive would end when the power ran out.
Of course, that’s not going to happen – but neither is a non-violent shutdown of the Internet as in the OP’s scenario. Even if GWB were to give the orders, saner heads would prevail in either case. Although POTUS has in theory the right to give the launch order for all US nukes, such orders would not be carried out in the absence of triggering circumstances.
Sure, terrorists use the Internet. So do child molesters, illegal pornographers and common thieves, but such miscreants all existed pre-Internet and would remain post-Internet. The IRA, Libyans, Red Brigades, Baader-Meinhof, PLO, and many other terrorist groups all shared weapons, tactics, and training without using the Internet. The telephone and mail systems suited their purposes fine, and I would make the claim that cellphones and Satphones are considerably more useful for international terrorists than is the Internet.
The OP’s scenario is one in which the US truly would be cutting off its nose to spite its face. Even if the US were to sever all of the submarine cables [thanks for the link, Earthworm Jim] that make landfall on US soil, there’s still a lot of fiber controlled by other countries. Such a unilateral act would immediately throw the US into massively uncompetitive status with respect to its economic rivals. The rest of the world could survive the loss of the US economy much better than the other way around. Not that it would be easy…
Could the internet be shut down without bringing essential government services to a standstill?
Maybe he could shut one of them down…he thinks there are more than one.
“I hear there’s rumors on the Internets that we’re going to have a draft.” —second presidential debate, St. Louis, Mo., Oct. 8, 2004
It wouldn’t cause the net to immediately stop working, but wouldn’t removal of the root DNS servers break it, eventually? (assuming that efforts were made to ensure they were not replaced?).
Or worse, replacing the root DNS servers with tables that resolve to the wrong address; all pointing to a single server hosting a single page saying “pwned!!!11!oneoneone!!1”? Wouldn’t that do it?
Point of clarification - The Internet and the World Wide Web are not the same.
Is it technically possible? Yes.
Can he do it legally? Not sure.
Can he do it regardless of the legality? Yes.
there is also a competing gps system in place developed in europe. europeans don’t want to be at mercy of the US government
The vulnerability of root-level DNS servers is overrated. You can’t prevent them (well, their functionality) from being replaced - their tables are smaller than you’d think (hence “root level”) and it would be easy enough to stop the instances running in foreign national-level internet exchanges from replicating. People are only respecting their authority as root level resoources as long as they work.
In the US, the Gvt. could probably take control of the Tier 1 providers, so the US part of the Internet could be shutdown or separated from the rest of the world. Not even hard - going from the top of my head, I’d take control of the major route servers and announce a low-metric route to “undesireable” networks, then route their traffic to Null0. (I have a funny story of a German ISP doing more or less that, ask me one day. However…)
Outside of the US, it’s another story. Most of the international network is owned by telcos and ISPs in the respective countries, and they’ll pay no heed to a US court order. Some US companies (MCI springs to mind) do run major backbones in Europe and elsewhere, but I expect the local providers would be itching to ake up the slack. Besides, even carriers like MCI rarely own the lines, just the routers and the know-how. Lines ca be swung pretty quickly when needs be. Or the routers etc. could be seized as a matter of national interest. It’d be a major outage, but as has been noted, IP is built to handle this sort of thing.
Putting on my James Bond outfit, I could imagine a movie script where a major networking gear supplier - could be the one that rhymes with “Frisco” - shipped software with a suitable backdoor that could be abused to trigger a bad outage at a given time. Hmmm, I may have to develop that idea…
How would it be technically possible? I think the posters above have explained clearly that it would not be possible.
Besides through the use of brute force (i.e. destroying all the phone lines) I see no way that Bush could possibly shut down the internet. The internet isn’t controlled by America any more than America controls all the phone lines in the world. Do you think that North Korea or China would stop using the internet just because Bush said so? Or anyone else for that matter. He may have the power to stop the internet being used in America but outside U.S. borders nobody has to do anything he says.
So said Shagnasty. That was before they scorched the sky.
SkyNet would never allow it.
Of course we’re all assuming ‘shut down’ means to cut the connections in some way. I agree that the worst GWB could do would be to isolate America and even then it only takes one out-going connection to make communications possible again.
A better way to shut it down would be to overload the Internet with junk traffic, either by using a massively distributed computer network (which the US could easily get). Or the US could exploit various unpatched vulnerabilities in software or hardware around the network to take out network sections and generate traffic to swamp others. It would take a fair amount of work to keep the system inoperative but you could certainly reduce it’s effectiveness and cause communication blackouts to specific areas. Create enough havoc in America and eventually other parts of the network are forced to cut the connections to stop the rest of the world getting hit.
But Spiny Norman has a better idea with having a major manufacturer in on it, that could really stuff things up.
SD
