By Sam Bouchat
An “Internet Kill Switch” from 2009 is back before Senate, asking the ever-pertinent question: how much control should the government have on our communication? This switch, should it be approved, will be a comical rendition not unlike that huge, red atomic war button the president always accidentally hits in those oldie cartoons.
This, however, rather than killing the world with a humorous “Whoops!” of some clumsy national leader, will halt any internet activity deemed threatening, from your laptop to your iPhone.
A crazy concept, not doubt, that was just recently put into use. The Egyptian government disrupted internet activity in its country in an attempt to halt protestors from organizing. And while we all know that protesting only came into existence after the internet invented it, one has to wonder: what else is at stake?
In the event of a national emergency, is the internet really the largest concern? And would it in fact make matters worse? At some point, people will care less about the national emergency and more about the fact that they can’t log onto their face book, because, at the end of the day, personal emergencies disrupt our lives more so than national ones.
But the fact is that a kill switch is a breech of American rights on so many different levels, it’s nearly mind-boggling. The right to consume and share information has been an integral part of human development since we were doing little more than sitting in caves and grunting at each other. The fact that our communication is now primarily digital does not give anyone the right to shut it down any more than they would have the right to shove socks into our mouths to keep us from talking.
The excuse can be made that, hey, just because we have a kill switch doesn’t mean we’ll use it, but you could aim a sock cannon my face and claim the same thing.
We must consider that no single person has the fortitude or lack-of-agenda to decide when an event of national security constitutes the silence of our virtual voices. A kill switch invites, with open arms, those who would take advantage of it and, for all intents and purposes, use it for evil.
And quite honestly, it’s just screaming “Big Brother.”
In the most basic terms, the kill switch proposal is a proposal to halt the spread of ideas in the name of national security. This has happened before, and it always ends up with the U.S. government offering an apology for infringing on the people’s rights. I say we avoid the apology all together, take a step back and consider the implications before we’re recording them.