Uproar this year over an “Internet Kill Switch” bill has largely subsided because the legislation has stalled in the Senate. The summer controversy focused on a proposed presidential power to declare a national emergency and shut down parts of the Web dealing with “critical infrastructure,” for up to four weeks — which under a willing White House legal adviser, critics said, might lead to Chinese-style Web censorship for political enemies.
Actually, the bill was never so specific.
Sen. Joe Lieberman and its other sponsors in the Senate have argued the Protecting Cyberspace As a National Asset Act has no “kill switch” provision, only a sort of emergency-brake feature for the president in case of cyberwar. Or something.
“What authority the government would have is not laid out at all in the law,” said Michelle Richardson, an ACLU lawyer tasked with tracking the bill. Adam Cohen was right last month when he argued in Time that the bill’s language had to be far more precise before people start to freak out (on one hand) or Congress allows it to become law (on the other).
But Chinese-style censorship already exists in the West. Germany has blocked Holocaust-deniers from its patch of the Internet since the ’90s. In February, the Berlin government passed a more sinister law meant to keep child pornography away from German screens. The law allows the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), a sort of German FBI, to compile secret lists of outlawed sites. The law will be reviewed for its effectiveness after one year.
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