Except there is one problem with that 'kill switch' concept, there is no way to do it even if they have the legal "authority". A government document has no more power to "kill" the Internet in the US than gun laws have the power to disarm criminals. Iran tried it because they only have a half dozen international connections to unplug, all of which were owned by semi-government entities anyway; and even then data was getting out of Iran. The US has 10K independent ISP's with varying degrees of their own tier 2 or international connections; and international connections aren't even necessary since Facebook & Youtube (the sites Iranians were trying to access anyway) are in the US. Sure, they can drop the tier 3 connections linking NYC/Portland,OR/San Franisco/Atlanta,GA and force my ping rates to the moon and my frame rates to unplayable levels, but that's not going to break much else. Maybe some torrents would drop to zero. Even sending men with guns to Google & facebook to shut them down is only going to force alternatives to the top in short order.
A lot of internet infrastructure is based in US (ICANN, IANA, PIR, root nameservers, IXPs, gTLDs) so unfortunately they can cause some harm but overall US is too big to have Internet easily shut down, not like in Armenia xD
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12985082Indeed, that's my point. The Internet isn't some singular thing. While google & DNS would certainly represent single points of failure for how many people use the Internet, that is most certainly not the case for the savvy minority, and it's that same minority that are capable of doing the kind of harm that the 'kill switch' BS is intended to affect. It won't have significant effects on this group of people, but would affect the regular Internet users a great deal. That alone should make people question it's true intent. Either the bosses are truly ignorant of the nature of the Internet AND completely ignoring their own technically educated employees on the matter; or the deliberate disruption of the common users' regular communications methodologies is the real goal. Considering that I've worked for government in the past, I consider the first possibility to be more likely. Most people tend to assume that government agencies hire very talented people and listen to what they have to contribute, and thus, as an organization they function as an intelligent and well connected body. Nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that "the fog of war" applies very well to inter & intra-agency politics; and those that have risen to positions of authority tend to insulate themselves with politically & ideologically similar underlings, so the faults of the leadership often pervades deep enough vertically that anyone who has real knowledge to contribute are not in the position to communicate that knowledge with those in authority. Improve Anywhere has a much more effective group communcations network than many military units that I've experience with, even if the official military networks are more timely when properly used. I've seen evidence that a text-message based flash mob has better real time communications than the police.
