Social vs. Command & Control

August 10, 2011 2:06 PM

Social vs. Command & Control: Given how the UK police had a hard time dealing with the 'flash-mob' tactics of rioters when will governments attempt to shut down facebook/twitter/social sites during unrest?

Understanding that the internet is just a series of tubes, how much control do governments (particularly western democracies, e.g. UK/US) have over access to particular services? How much are they themselves dependent on them? Can they erase the DNS entries for facebook, or blackberry messaging and effectively stop rioters/protestors/opponents from using them for communication?

posted by gofargogo to computers & internet (6 answers total)

That happened in Egypt during the troubles, and it's happened in Syria.

It's the kind of thing that totalitarian governments will do. But for a western democracy, it really goes against the grain. I don't think you'll be seeing it happen in Western Europe or North America.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 2:08 PM on August 10, 2011

My understanding is that Egypt and Syria shut down the internet by closing off the "edge routers", which I imagine the US/EU wouldn't do because it's effectively the nuclear option with massive economic and political fallout.

But given the (presumed, on my part) high level access the US/EU has to the command structures of the internet, could they do a more focused shutdown of only blackberry messaging, or make twitter/facebook fall off the map? Would google+ be more costly to circumvent, because it (again, presumably) mean taking google offline as well?

I only have dangerous understanding of global networking, so forgive me if I'm completely missing the obvious answers.
posted by gofargogo at 2:18 PM on August 10, 2011

Even if the U.S. is capable of doing this, to do so would likely result in a constitutional crisis and impeachment, if it were instiguated by the president. The nation's leaders might use the power of persuasion to encourage service providers to remove things, however, and probably do.
posted by croutonsupafreak at 2:28 PM on August 10, 2011

If the US wanted to shut down twitter, the easiest thing to do would be to just go in the data centers and take the servers. Egypt didn't have that option.

I think it's exceedingly unlikely that it would ever happen in the US, though, just for legal reasons.

The second thing would be to go after their DNS provider, but that's easily gotten around with IP addresses and alternate DNS servers.

After that, the options are pretty dicey. You could get ISP's to nullroute IP blocks or falsely advertise ip blocks as Pakistan did with youtube, but you'd have to get cooperation from all the ISPs, because it's easy to unwind that once ISPs find out what's happening.

Even if they attack DNS and IPs, you can still set up proxies outside the country and proxies to get around it.

It's far more likely that they'd just monitor the traffic and use it for intelligence gathering purposes.
posted by empath at 2:29 PM on August 10, 2011 [1 favorite]

If the US wanted to shut down twitter, the easiest thing to do would be to just go in the data centers and take the servers. Egypt didn't have that option.

Actually, I'm betting it wouldn't. A site as big as Twitter is going to be distributed to prevent outages due to natural disasters, utility interruptions, etc. What works for natural disasters works about as well for heavy-handed law enforcement agencies.

No, what would likely happen is that the Attorney General would give Jack Dorsey a call and tell him to flip the switch if he knows what's good for him. Taking Twitter offline from the outside is hard. Taking Twitter offline from the inside is probably really easy. And if Twitter voluntarily complies with an order that would be illegal to enforce without a warrant, they not only preserve their right to sue the government later, but they avoid pissing off the Department of Justice, which has plenty of ways of expressing its displeasure. How'd you like to be audited this year? I didn't think so.

The thing to remember is that Twitter is a corporation, the goal of which is to make money. Corporations have to be pushed really, really hard before they stand up to government regulation, heavy-handed or no, as cooperation is almost always better for the bottom line.
posted by valkyryn at 4:20 PM on August 10, 2011 [1 favorite]

Sadly, this is no longer an idle question.
posted by gofargogo at 6:16 PM on August 12, 2011