“He could invoke powers we’ve never heard a President of the United States invoke—potentially to shut down companies or turn off the internet or deploy the U.S. military on U.S. soil,” he added. "We don’t know because the things that are in there, the emergency powers of the president, aren’t widely known to the American people.
Wow, it’s almost like we’ve consolidated too much power in the Executive Branch and should do something about it before a despotic asswipe gets elected by an unhinged, manipulated populace.
Again. With nothing to lose this time…
Worse, he’s got everything to lose if he doesn’t find power to abuse to get him out of the hole he’s currently hanging over.
This was on the principle that only the most intelligent and qualified would serve…wich tbh…they should have seen it comming
His MAGAlings must be shocked that he said he’d consult Bill Gates. Of course, cognitive dissonance is like water off a duck’s back to them, so that won’t last long.
Thankfully, he thinks unplugging the router in the Oval Office breaks it for everyone else, too.
He’ll just keep hitting the reload button in his browser. Makes it hard for anybody to read anything.
That worked out well for Mubarak.
None of this is going to happen
I remember, so clearly, a conversation, debate, argument, with a relative, at a funeral ffs, in 2016. He was a Trump supporter. I was talking about all the awful, terrifying, heartbreaking things that Trump was indicating he would do. My relative said just that. None of that will happen, you’ll see, it will all be fine. Literally every one of those things happened. The indications of much worse things are even stronger this time. Wake up. None of that will happen, if, and only if, we fight like hell to stop it.
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It was built to survive a nuclear war.
It will survive Trump.
Even if I have to drive a station wagon full of backup tapes myself.
There are countries that turn off the internet all the time. There’s a only a few major Telcos that control all backbone infra. It could definitely happen
once the internet is off the rest of the world will not be witness to the awful crimes they will commit against the public… :/
External connections? Probably.
Low-latency internal connections? Sure.
But when you can send IP packets over pigeons things get harder to disrupt.
Hence the station wagon.
Do you think that’s a realistic way to keep sufficient modern Internet traffic moving?
No, but it will keep some things moving. Ham radio and mesh networks will help, too.
Who here is old enough to remember the “internet kill switch”?
many countries have them. they are used to orchestrate media blackouts.
Not sure why you are downvoted. Some countries even use them during testing times so students don’t cheat or get distracted or whatever when taking tests. I’m not even kidding
https://pulse.internetsociety.org/blog/tracking-internet-shutdowns-in-2023
Back when that bill I linked was introduced, the generally-accepted narriative was that “sure most governments can shut off the internet to their own countries, but the U.S. can shut off the internet for the whole world.” So, yes, other countries have internet kill switches, but if that’s (still) true, probably no country can more drastically hobble the worldwide internet as a whole.
The root DNS servers are in the U.S… The first internet backbone is in the U.S… In 2010, it seemed like the U.S. government did have the power to make virtually the entire internet grind to a rapid halt.
IIRC there was also language in the bill saying all kinds of bullshit things about how since the internet was started in the U.S. by a U.S. government agency, the U.S. “owned” the internet and thus… had every right to shut off the internet if they so chose or some shit.
Since I first saw your comment, I did a little googling. Not a ton, and the sources I’ve found so far aren’t all that reliable. But mostly the answers I’ve found say that the U.S.’ ability to shut down the internet to other parts of the world is more limited than I’d heard it was in 2010. I’m not sure if it was overstated back then or if things have changed since then (or if the sources I found are wrong and the U.S. government could pretty much destroy the whole internet if it chose to.) But hopefully it’s true that the U.S. doesn’t have that kind of power.
The root DNS servers are in the U.S.
Originally, sure, but now of days its anycasted. And should we lose root servers, it’d be chaos for a while, but we’d survive.
Root DNS servers are geographically spread and definitely not only in US.
https://www.pingdom.com/blog/dns-root-server-geography-facts/
And you don’t even need them, for the short term. Virtually all of your DNS queries are answered by machines much closer to you than the root servers. If you don’t have it in a local DNS cache, you go to the authoritative nameserver for the domain you’re requesting, which is also not a root DNS server, but one of the millions of other zone nameservers. Shutting down the root servers can also be routed around by setting up a different configuration, or just routing the addresses for the roots to something else that you control.
Then you get to the backbones, which are a bigger deal. Shut a few of those down–maybe with the enforcement help of local cops and the FBI, assuming you can get them on board–and you’ll slow traffic to a crawl. No Netflix for most folks, not for a while. But communication itself would still find a way around.
And all of that assumes he can even get anyone to agree to this, and he’s probably the only person with any power who’s stupid enough to think this is a good idea. It just doesn’t work, not on any level, not even if he takes office, still thinks this is a good idea (which he doesn’t, this is an obvious bluff), and can find a bunch of idiots in power willing to help.
i didn’t say it was a good thing. i think “media blackouts” is obviously negative enough.
Please Donald piss off the wrong people. I double dog dare you.
If the Internet goes off, it means most of the US will be pissed off at him. Cellphones would be basically useless.
His followers wouldn’t be able to access their favorite propaganda and conspiracy theories, either, so maybe they’d sober up a bit. Either way, it would not be good for him.
I mean, he can’t. Even if he claims to have the executive power, even if he found a bunch of lackeys willing to try to do it for him, he can’t do it. Whatever he did would be unenforceable. You can’t just turn off the Internet. That’s literally the reason we invented it in the first place, it’s a communication network resilient against nuclear strikes and war and bad-faith governance all at once.
He could probably make it very hard to use, given a lot of time, but he’d be eaten alive by the angry populace long before it ever reached that point.
How many internet service providers would have to go along before the internet was effectively off? 3? 4?
Why would a company agree to stop making money?
You wouldn’t need an ISP to have servers communicate, if push comes to shove. So maybe “effectively off” as we know it, but damn near impossible to stop communication if people need it
I mean, off for whom? There’s people who think facebook IS the internet and will be forced to go outside if they can’t read their racist memes today. For critical comms, you’d have to shut off way more than 3 or 4 big companies to make a dent. For sensitive, high-bandwidth applications that involve a lot of people being online at once, you would need to hit fewer before the damage is noticeable.
I agree that the internet is far more than facebook. But if you’re blocked at the edge of the network by your ISP, there’s really not much you can do. You’ll have access to nothing, Facebook or otherwise. Not even something low bandwidth.
If At&t, Comcast, Charter, Verizon, and T-Mobile suddenly stopped providing service to all their customers, then essentially no-one would be able to use anything on the internet at all. Even if the backbone itself (which I believe is largely owned by those same companies, but not sure) and some large datacenters that are their own isps were able to keep talking to each other, anything business or user facing would stop.
Some people who run their own mesh networks might be able to stay in contact (and people would try and start some local ones as this disaster unfolds), but that’s so few people.
But we still haven’t established why. It makes no sense that companies that only make money providing a service would stop providing the service. I wouldn’t even be able to pay my ISP because that happens over the Internet.
I was assuming this was the government ordering the companies to. They have no incentive to do so on their own. But I believe there was a bill (which thankfully didn’t pass) that would have given the president the power to essentially order the internet turned off.
Who are the wrong people? Have people similar to them offered significant resistance to past fascist regimes?
Yes.
The first time they lost because liberals actively embargoed them while selling guns and oil under the table to the fascists.
I’m not sure you’re talking about the same thing billwashere was talking about, but I’d like to hear more of your thoughts.
Please, ask him to download it before turning it off.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Donald Trump may turn off the internet if elected to a second term in the White House, a former staffer has warned.
Miles Taylor, Trump’s former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, was asked on MSNBC about what potential damage the former president, who is the frontrunner in the GOP primaries, could do in government without breaking the law.
I think Americans still don’t understand the full extent of the president’s powers and things Donald Trump could do, bubble-wrapped in legalese, that would be damaging to the republic."
“He could invoke powers we’ve never heard a President of the United States invoke—potentially to shut down companies or turn off the internet or deploy the U.S. military on U.S. soil,” he added.
In a Republican debate later that month, Trump said he was “open to closing areas” of the internet to prevent terrorism.
Removing internet service in certain areas of the U.S. would require multiple companies to turn off their cell towers and fiber networks, and to restrict satellite access to people living in those regions.
The original article contains 636 words, the summary contains 178 words. Saved 72%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
He’s also promising to go into people’s houses at night and wreck up the place.
I literally just watched this scene minutes before I read this.
Arrroooooo!!
I feel a jowl movement coming on!
And sell our children’s organs to zoos for meat?
Oh shit he’s been watching south park
I mean he wanted to attack a hurricane with nukes likely because he saw it in Sharknado, so not that unlikely.
