how hard would it be for a rogue and oppressive government in this country to deactivate the internet system in this country to wreck anyone's chances to organize, communicate, get the word out of the country, and generally jam up any resistance against it?  It sounds like the Mullahs have successfully curtailed any outside contact by internet. This is probably a naive question but what would it entail?

If China or Russia were to launch an invasion against us you better believe the first salvo would be cyberwarfare.

Not easy at all, without a very organized government effort. Arpanet and the Internet were designed to be as redundant as possible. Scattered denial of service are easy, a complete shutdown is not.

+1

Shit, China launches regular cyberwarfare salvos at us when we're at peace.

Im sure that given the level of 'unhappiness' here lately , that .gov has a plan to scramble the majority of it if needed.






An my foil is shiny side out and fits nicely,thanks.

Amateur Radio:

Packet, PSK31, etc.

Hard to jam up all the airwaves.

They wouldn't do it, they are focused on the destruction of Israel right now.  

We are destroying ourselves, enough that we can't even help Israel is a massive attack were to occur.  We are broke, pussy government, and already in 2 other wars.

What would be the best way to protect against it? What preparations do we need to make? Would it be possible for the government to knock out the entire phone system since this is the most common delivery service we all use?

Many copies of vital things in different places relying on different resources is the only way to proof yourself from cyberwarfare.

Shiny side out, huh?  Shit..

-X

Like Immanuel has stated, let no emergency go to waste. I would not put it past the current administration to consider the possibilities.

All they'd have to do is lean on the major telecoms and the internet as you see it would shut down. It would be a regional shutdown, i.e Comcast, Verizon, AT&T... they support the backbones.

While total denial of service may not be practical I am sure the government could twist arms of major ISPs and backbone companies.  This would take off line the highest capacity servers and comm lines, and force routing through smaller server farms and comm lines.  Add to this that in an emergency everyone will be online to find out what is happening and you would have tremendously degraded service.  Each web page would take minutes or hours to load.



In such a scenario it would be best to revert to low bandwidth friendly web pages such as text-only.  Currently the Internet has grown to service image dense pages.  Text-only pages would be barely a blip for transmission.  In a severely degraded state the Internet might be able to stay reasonably responsive by reverting to text-only, and storing key photos and videos at limited sights for group viewing.  The problem is that a lot of people would still be "competing" to give the best info by posting image dense content which would jam up transfers.



I suspect a government initiated slowdown would at first cause immense aggravation and near total lock up.  But Internet users have proven to be extremely adaptable and would soon figure out the advantages of text-only pages and limiting images for certain sites that could be used for less frequent group viewing.  Once enough info got passed around about what was truly happening there would be political uproar to force the government to cease its interference.



The tech companies have all worked to enable extensive government control of the Internet, vis a vis China.  And the government has proven how easily it can control major corporations:  Chrysler, GM, Lehman Bros., BofA, etc.  If they realy, really wanted to it would be easy for the .gov to throttle back, filetr, or completely shut down the Internet, if they were willing to bear the consequences.  Then FAX machines would make a comeback, like in 1985 Poland.





 

BUT I CANT LIVE OFF 56K

I wuv you internets <3