Donald Trump May 'Turn Off the Internet'. How even? A thought experiment.
Donald Trump May 'Turn Off the Internet'. How even? A thought experiment.
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
He'd have his man-servant turn off the wifi on his phone. As long as the little symbol is gone, that means the internet no longer exists. Object Permanence isn't his strong suit.
Hahahaha pretty reasonable
We're talking about a guy who said he could remotely de-classify documents by thinking real hard about them. Maybe he's under the impression that the internet will magically shut down when he says "turn yourself off!" out loud three times.
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.
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.
It would also completely fuck our critical infrastructure. There's enough that needs connectivity for it to cascade to much more.
Their agenda is to roll back the clock and I don’t mean metaphorically.
For many countries, it'd be as easy as cutting a few undersea cables. Two to three cut cables in 2008 brought down most of the Arab peninsula.
https://www.wired.com/2008/12/mediterranean-c/
As for the US and Europe, things are too interconnected for that to work. That said, the Internet as a whole is more centralized than you might expect from its history as a network that was supposed to be nuclear war proof.
Probably fucking with BGP somehow but I don't really know beyond that
All paths lead to the singularity. There is no going back. Every stumbling block can be circumvented. But if he was determined, he'd probably declare war on the undersea cables that transfer the internet between countries, which is so easy to do we've had to stop sharks and pistol shrimp from doing it.
The "Internet" isn't actually a thing. You can disrupt large portions of computer interconnectivity by targeting popular service providers and the larger traffic hubs. Because there is no central junction or single vendor or provider it isn't really something that can be completely shut off in one brush stroke. Note that television and voice calls and all money uses the same infrastructure. Selectively shutting off somethings and not others would be even harder.
Setting aside that making sense of things Trump suggests is pointless: one method would be a blanket order that telecom providers turn off access in a targeted area. I expect in America some portion of people would still figure out how to get connectivity, but cutting off 80% of internet access would still be very disruptive.
This is where I was leaning when thinking about it initially. It would almost have to be a non-technical solution. I'm guessing he's more of an "internet for me, but not for thee" kind of turn-off-the-internet guy so infrastructure and service would need to operate on some level
Devil in the details, as with all things he says...
If we redefined what "turn off" means, and make it more like "no access to internet" the end result of turning off the internet is achieved.
So far, forcing telcos into action might be the most applicable? They can pick and choose services to disable I assume
I remember Mubarak managing to do so while he was in the process of being overthrown.
Egypts internet infrastructure of 2011 does not equal US internet infrastructure of 2025. The US is too well connected to feasibly turn off the internet. With egypt in 2011 they only had to shut down five ISPs and that shut off the internet in their country.
EMP
Wouldn't that obliterate a ton of other infrastructure and do much more turn turn off the internet....basically turn any electronic device into a brick?
Oh, you wanted to turn it back on? That’s extra.
Man, Trump is living rent free in people's heads.
He has openly stated he wants to be a dictator, to dissolve Congress, and to rule for life. That type of tyrant is going to be on the minds of people.