Boston bombing outage rumors shed light on mobile and Internet ‘kill switch’
RT -
Following the Boston Marathon bombings, news began to spread of a US government cellphone network shutdown. While the claims were quickly shown to be false, a secret federal rule does, in fact, make such a shutdown possible.
While the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has in the past denied the existence of Standard Operating Procedure 303, as Ars Technica recently pointed out, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) challenged the secrecy of such documents in 2012 by filing a Freedom of Information Act request.
What EPIC found via its lawsuit was that a 2007 report stated that the network shutdown policy was adopted in March of 2006. According to that report, the National Coordinating Center, a part of the DHS, was to be the main player in “any actions leading up to and following the termination of private wireless network connections, both within a localized area, such as a tunnel or bridge, and within an entire metropolitan area.”
There has been particular focus on government possession of any sort of ‘kill switch’ over cell networks and internet service since the embattled government of Hosni Mubarak shut down both in Egypt at the height of protests in 2011.
That same year, when San Francisco’s transit authority made the decision to shut off cell phone networks within its metro service in anticipation of protests, critics were quick to point out the draconian implications.
Read More: rt.com
2013-04-19 02:00:17
Source:
