January 31, 2011

Shutting Off the Internet

Filed under: Main — admin @ 12:01 am

Last week, Egyptian officials shut off Internet access to their country. By doing so, they demonstrated that A) it could be done and B) how to do it. They also provided ample material for those of us would would fight such a move in the future.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be the US Government that would take the United States off the Internet. Indeed, while I recommend keeping an eye on your own government, it’s probably more likely that a foreign power would deem it necessary to disable Internet access in your country. Either way, it’s demonstrated as possible by what happened in Egypt.

Basically, the Egyptian government hijacked its own routers, specifically the boarder routers that are used internationally to identify sites inside the country. It didn’t happen overnight, but it happened.

Here is an article that describes how Egypt was taken off the Internet, but also talks about how the US Government could try the same thing.

More importantly, this article describes how the people could resurrect an Internet of sorts should the government actually persuade all the big pipes to shut down.

My advice: Print out that last article, just in case.

Then again, if the US or any other leading country was in such a desperate situation as to turn off the Internet, things would probably be bad enough that it would be a concern for you. No, you’d probably be more concerned with food, shelter, heat, and other necessities as opposed to getting more nails to built a barn in Farmville.

LOL.

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