To the NSA: Preserving the Open Internet and the Constitutional Republic of the United States of America
In 2014, I was invited by the Harvard Berkman Center to a closed seminar titled, “Intelligence Gathering and the Unowned Internet.”
Here’s my RSVP acknowledgement:
Thank you for your RSVP to the event, “Intelligence Gathering and the Unowned Internet,” taking place tomorrow (4/8) at 12:00PM at Harvard Law School, Wasserstein Hall, Millstein West A (Second Floor). The panel will feature Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies Yochai Benkler, Director of Compliance at the National Security Agency John Delong, Director of the NSA/CSS Commercial Solutions Center Anne Neuberger, Berkman Fellow Bruce Schneier, and Professor of Law, Government, and Computer Science Jonathan Zittrain, moderated by WilmerHale Professor of Intellectual Property Law Terry Fisher.
For more information about the event, visit http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2014/04/unownedinternet.
This luncheon will be brown bag / bring your own. We encourage you to arrive a few minutes early to secure a seat. Please note that this event is at capacity and accruing a wait list — if you find yourself unable to attend, please let me know ASAP.
We look forward to seeing you.
Best,
Dana
When I attended I found it was standing room only. I was the only one who brought a statement, which I distributed. Several people came up behind me and said things like, you are not alone, and we are doing what we can. At the end I hand delivered the statement below to several participants including Anne Neuberger and John Delong. We had a cordial discussion. I told them they’ve been living in a bubble and going to closed seminars with hand-picked attendees from the highest levels of academia and the IC wasn’t enough to get them out where they could hear the people. Anne said maybe we have or to that effect.
MEMO
To: The NSA and the Intelligence Community
From: Henry Edward Hardy
RE: Preserving the Open Internet and the Constitutional Republic of the United States of America
2014-04-08
Summary
Recommendations:
1. Re-establish the firewall between foreign intelligence and domestic law enforcement.
2. Require a specific, not general, warrant with probable cause for any surveillance of anyone in the world. The idea that you can segregate US persons from others as far as surveillance is a legal fiction, and in practice, next to impossible.
3. Ban and retroactively abolish all general warrants and bills of attainder. Retroactively rescind, and ban the future use of National Security Letters.
4. Disallow active duty military personnel from working for NSA.
5. Remove CSS from NSA.
6. Abolish FISA and the FISA court.
7. Abolish the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act.
8. Repeal the USAPATRIOT Act and the FISA Act.
9. Re-establish posse comitatus.
10. Re-establish habeus corpus.
11. Eliminate the pen register exemption from the fourth amendment which has been used to justify the coillection of so-called metadata.
12. Restore and strengthen the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.
13. Strengthen whistleblower protection for US Government employees, and extend this protection to contractors as well.
14. Abolish the UK/USA Pact, the so-called “Five Eyes.” Disallow sharing of foreign intelligence with any other nation or entity which cannot be held accountable to the US Constitution.
15. Hold NSA employees and contractors and the FISA court judges legally accountable.
—
main text follows:
The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government. As compared with their opposite numbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition. This last difference was cardinal. By comparison with that existing today, all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient. The ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act and to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking. Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards. Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time.
–George Orwell
1984
1948
My name is Henry Edward Hardy. I am a senior systems administrator at Tufts University, and I am speaking here only for myself and not for my institution or any other group or entity.
I’ve been a system administrator since the days of the ARPAnet. Back then when I started there were only maybe 100 thousand to 200 thousand people on the net, and a few thousand administrators. We were few enough that we could all be identified by our initials. My NIC handle is HEH. We were all together then. Anyone who knew enough to ask, could get an account on dockmaster. I thought you guys were heroes. I thought you kept us safe from tyranny and a godless totalitarian surveillance state.
Suffice it to say you aren’t my heroes anymore. You *are* the totalitarian face of a comprehensive surveillance state which would have put the KGB and Securitate to shame.
We were all together then and we all worked to nurture and protect that which we recognized as so dear, so unique and valuable, the Internet. The greatest achievement of mankind, and the greatest gift of the United States to the world, a vehicle and a venue for cooperation, understanding, learning and creativity. For freedom and liberty guaranteed by anonymity and privacy.
It is a truism to say that “everyone has secrets.” More profoundly, everyone knows something which they would literally do anything to prevent being made known to others. It might be something criminal, but in most cases it is not. It could be knowledge of a family matter, of an affair, or a child whose father isn’t who they think it is. It could be a medical matter, or a sexual fetish. It could be a key, a password to a bank account or a brokerage account. It could be a business matter. In any event, if you and you alone have access to all the world’s secrets, and when there is no public accountability or restraint through the mechanisms of a democratic society, then your power, and the inevitability of its abuse, is unlimited.
System administrators should be your allies. We both want to protect the Internet and keep it safe. In theory anyway. But when we read in the popular press snarky blather such as “I Hunt Sysadmins” then how can we regard you as friends?
Before the United States was founded, the British had a secret court called, “The Star Chamber”. The Star Chamber started by 1398 and was shut down in 1640. One of the motives in establishing the Bill of Rights was to insure there would be no secret Star Chamber-like courts in America. As wikipedia puts it,
The historical abuses of the Star Chamber are considered a primary motivating force behind the protections against compelled self-incrimination embodied in the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution.[14] The meaning of “compelled testimony” under the Fifth Amendment – i.e., the conditions under which a defendant is allowed to “plead the Fifth” to avoid self-incrimination – is thus often interpreted via reference to the inquisitorial methods of the Star Chamber.[15]
As the U.S. Supreme Court described it [in Faretta v California], “the Star Chamber has, for centuries, symbolized disregard of basic individual rights.”
Spying on everyone all the time without a specific warrant for which there is probable cause: if that isn’t compelled self-incrimination then I don’t know what is.
The Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court, sometimes called “The FISA Court” is just such an unconstitutional secret Star Chamber. Shut it down now, and repeal and invalidate all of its decisions retroactively.
One of the Abuses of the British which led to the US Revolution was the use of General Warrants. People were not secure in their homes or papers. The British ultimately used this power to quarter British soldiers in the homes of unwilling citizens. The result was a violent revolution, and the writing of a constitution intended to prevent General Warrants from ever being used again.
My advice: stop using General Warrants. They are both Totalitarian and Unconstitutional.
My message to you is: Stop Spying on us.
Follow the Constitutional process. Get a specific warrant based on probable cause and approved by a judge in open court. And use open source methods whenever possible, and surveillance as a last resort.
My recommendations are:
1. Re-establish the firewall between foreign intelligence and domestic law enforcement.
2. Require a specific, not general, warrant with probable cause for any surveillance of anyone in the world. The idea that you can segregate US persons from others as far as surveillance is a legal fiction, and in practice, next to impossible.
3. Ban and retroactively abolish all general warrants and bills of attainder. Retroactively rescind, and ban the future use of National Security Letters.
4. Disallow active duty military personel from working for NSA.
5. Remove CSS from NSA.
6. Abolish FISA and the FISA court.
7. Abolish the Communications Assistance to Law Enforement Act.
8. Repeal the USAPATRIOT Act and the FISA Act.
9. Re-establish posse comitatus.
10. Re-establish habeus corpus.
11. Eliminate the pen register exemption from the fourth amendment which has been used to justify the collection of so-called metadata.
12. Restore and strengthen the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.
13. Strengthen whistleblower protection for US Government employees, and extend this protection to contractors as well.
14. Abolish the UK/USA Pact, the so-called “Five Eyes.” Disallow sharing of foreign intelligence with any other nation or entity which cannot be held accountable to the US Constitution.
15. Hold NSA employees and contractors and the FISA court judges legally accountable.
Sincerely,
Henry Edward Hardy
senior systems administrator
Tufts University
institutional affiliation for identification purposes only
[email elided]
The people who built the Internet
From 1969 to 2013, the Internet has gone from this:
to this:
Visualization of part of 207.205.0.0/16
I’m going to talk about some of the people who I think were important in setting the shape of things to come. My criteria isn’t really who is most worthy but rather, who did really important things, is interesting, and some early figures have a local Boston connection as you will see.
Vannevar Bush
Tufts BS and MS dual-degree 1913
PhD Engineering 1917 jointly from Harvard and MIT
Worked at Tufts till 1919
American Radio and Research Corporation (AMRAD) at Tufts continuing
1922 founded the American Appliance Company in Cambridge, which became Raytheon
1927 differential analyzer, an analog computer that could solve first order differential equations of up to 18 variables
MIT Prof from 1919
VP and Dean of Engineering at MIT from 1932
One of his students was Claude Shannon, who went on to write “The Mathematical Theory of Communication” an important foundational work in information theory
Headed National Research Defense Council 1938 (later Office of Scientific Research and Development). As such he initiated the Manhatten Project which developed the first atomic bombs.
1938 appointed vice-chair to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics which he soon ended up chairing. This was the forerunner of NASA.
Declined to fund Norburt Weiner’s digital computer project, but the Army did. This became ENIAC, one of the first all-purpose general programmable digital computers.
Later instrumental in setting up the National Science Foundation.
As We May Think:
“The camera hound of the future wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut. It takes pictures 3 millimeters square, later to be projected or enlarged, which after all involves only a factor of 10 beyond present practice…
The Encyclopoedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk. If the human race has produced since the invention of movable type a total record, in the form of magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertising blurbs, correspondence, having a volume corresponding to a billion books, the whole affair, assembled and compressed, could be lugged off in a moving van. Mere compression, of course, is not enough; one needs not only to make and store a record but also to be able to consult it, and this aspect of the matter comes later. Even the modern great library is not generally consulted; it is nibbled by a few…
All this is conventional, except for the projection forward of present-day mechanisms and gadgetry. It affords an immediate step, however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing…
Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client’s interest. The physician, puzzled by its patient’s reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior…
The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail which stops only at the salient items, and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world’s record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected…
The impulses which flow in the arm nerves of a typist convey to her fingers the translated information which reaches her eye or ear, in order that the fingers may be caused to strike the proper keys. Might not these currents be intercepted, either in the original form in which information is conveyed to the brain, or in the marvelously metamorphosed form in which they then proceed to the hand?
In the outside world, all forms of intelligence, whether of sound or sight, have been reduced to the form of varying currents in an electric circuit in order that they may be transmitted. Inside the human frame exactly the same sort of process occurs. Must we always transform to mechanical movements in order to proceed from one electrical phenomenon to another? It is a suggestive thought, but it hardly warrants prediction without losing touch with reality and immediateness…”
Atlantic Monthly, July 1945
Claude Shannon
Student of Vannevar Bush at MIT
Proved that Boolean algebra can resolve any logical or mathematical syllogism or operation — thus logic and mathematics can be reduced to zeros and ones
Mathematical Theory of Communication — uniting information theory and thermodynamics
Co-invented first wearable computer
Norbert Weiner
Norbert Weiner — Cybernetics, 1947
MIT prof
Probability theory used in information theory
Cybernetics 1947
Human in the loop–feedback
ENIAC — Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer –1946
JCR Licklider
Project SAGE
MIT
Man-Computer Symbiosis
Memos to the Intergalactic Computer Network
“In the foregoing, I must have exercised several network features. I engaged in information retrieval through some kind of system that looked for programs to meet certain requirements I had in mind. Presumably, this was a system based upon descriptors, or reasonable facsimiles thereof, and not in the near future, upon computer appreciation of natural language. However, it would be pleasant to use some of the capabilities of avant-garde linguistics. In using the borrowed programs, I effected some linkages between my programs and the borrowed ones. Hopefully, I did this without much effort–hopefully, the linkages were set up–or the basis for making them was set up–when the programs were brought into the part of the stytem [sic.] that I was using. I did not borrow any data, but that was only because I was working on experimental data of my own. If I had been trying to test some kind of a theory, I would have wanted to borrow data as well as programs.
When the computer operated the programs for me, I suppose that the activity took place in the computer at SDC, which is where we have been assuming I was. However, I would just as soon leave that on the level of inference. With a sophisticated network-control system, I would not decide whether to send the data and have them worked on by programs somewhere else, or bring in programs and have them work on my data. I have no great objection to making that decision, for a while at any rate, but, in principle, it seems better for the computer, or the network, somehow, to do that. At the end of my work, I filed some things away, and tried to do it in such a way that they would be useful to others. That called into play, presumably, some kind of a convention-monitoring system that, in its early stages, must almost surely involve a human criterian as well as maching [sic.] processing.”
Project MAC Director, 1968-71
Project on Mathematics and Computation — now (more or less) CSAIL at MIT
Developed MULTICS — Multiplexed Information and Computing Service 1965-2000
MULTICS was important for:
No distinction between files and process memory — similar to tmpfs
Dynamic linking
Online hardware reconfiguration
Hierarchical file system
User shell
Brian Kernighan (Project MAC, then Bell Labs) and Dennis Ritchie (Harvard, Bell Labs) wrote C
Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie from Project Mac went on to write UNIX 1969-1973
Bill Joy and others backported everything in UNIX to make BSD 1973-1994
Andrew Tannebaum wrote MINIX 1987, which Linus Torvalds turned into Linux 1991
BBN
started by two MIT professors and a student
originally specializing in acoustics
did defense work for submarine detection
Licklider became a star at ARPA
his vision for the Intergalactic Computer Network became the basis for the ARPAnet
First IMPs, ancestors of routers
First autonomous system of the ARPA internet, AS1 (now owned by Level 3 Communications)
ARPANET
“The earliest ideas for a computer network intended to allow general communications among computer users were formulated by computer scientist J. C. R. Licklider of Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), in April 1963, in memoranda discussing his concept for an “Intergalactic Computer Network”. Those ideas contained almost everything that composes the contemporary Internet. In October 1963, Licklider was appointed head of the Behavioral Sciences and Command and Control programs at the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency — ARPA (the initial ARPANET acronym). He then convinced Ivan Sutherland and Bob Taylor that this computer network concept was very important and merited development, although Licklider left ARPA before any contracts were let that worked on this concept.[5]
Ivan Sutherland and Bob Taylor continued their interest in creating such a computer communications network, in part, to allow ARPA-sponsored researchers at various corporate and academic locales to put to use the computers ARPA was providing them, and, in part, to make new software and other computer science results quickly and widely available.[6] In his office, Taylor had three computer terminals, each connected to separate computers, which ARPA was funding: the first, for the System Development Corporation (SDC) Q-32, in Santa Monica; the second, for Project Genie, at the University of California, Berkeley; and the third, for Multics, at MIT. Taylor recalls the circumstance: “For each of these three terminals, I had three different sets of user commands. So, if I was talking online with someone at S.D.C., and I wanted to talk to someone I knew at Berkeley, or M.I.T., about this, I had to get up from the S.D.C. terminal, go over and log into the other terminal and get in touch with them. I said, “Oh Man!”, it’s obvious what to do: If you have these three terminals, there ought to be one terminal that goes anywhere you want to go. That idea is the ARPANET”.[7] Somewhat contemporaneously, several other people had (mostly independently) worked out the aspects of “packet switching”, with the first public demonstration presented by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), on 5 August 1968, in the United Kingdom.[8]”
“The initial ARPANET consisted of four IMPs:[15]
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where Leonard Kleinrock had established a Network Measurement Center, with an SDS Sigma 7 being the first computer attached to it;
The Stanford Research Institute’s Augmentation Research Center, where Douglas Engelbart had created the ground-breaking NLS system, a very important early hypertext system (with the SDS 940 that ran NLS, named “Genie”, being the first host attached);
University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), with the Culler-Fried Interactive Mathematics Center’s IBM 360/75, running OS/MVT being the machine attached;
The University of Utah’s Computer Science Department, where Ivan Sutherland had moved, running a DEC PDP-10 operating on TENEX.
The first message on the ARPANET was sent by UCLA student programmer Charley Kline, at 10:30 pm on 29 October 1969, from Boelter Hall 3420.[16] Kline transmitted from the university’s SDS Sigma 7 Host computer to the Stanford Research Institute’s SDS 940 Host computer. The message text was the word login; the l and the o letters were transmitted, but the system then crashed. Hence, the literal first message over the ARPANET was lo. About an hour later, having recovered from the crash, the SDS Sigma 7 computer effected a full login. The first permanent ARPANET link was established on 21 November 1969, between the IMP at UCLA and the IMP at the Stanford Research Institute. By 5 December 1969, the entire four-node network was established.[17]”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
1971 Ray Tomlinson of BBN sent the first internetwork email — invention of the use of the @ sign for email addresses
Larry Roberts
MIT BS, MS, PhD 1963
Lincoln Labs
1966 program manager in the ARPA Information Processing Techniques Office
funded ARPAnet
Bob Taylor -> Viet Nam 1969, Roberts became director of IPTO
left 1973
Bob Khan
MA, PhD Princeton 1962/64
Bell Labs then asst prof MIT
BBN develop first IMP
1972 IPTO
1972 demostrate ARPANET by connecting 20 computers
Developed NCP and TCP/IP with others such as Vint Cerf
left DARPA 1986
1992 with Cerf helped to found Internet Society
Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn being awarded the Presidential Medal Of Freedom by President Bush
Don Davies
Imperial College
1947 started at NPL
Working with Alan Turing who was designing the Atomatic Computing Engine
Invented term packet-switching
ACE, the Automatic Computing Engine 1950
Mark I, the first packet-switched network, 1970
First modern packet-switched terrestrial network (aside from automatic telegraph)
Len Kleinrock
Leonard Kleinrock and the first Interface Message Processor
Routing MIT PhD thesis 1962 MIT
UCLA Prof 1963 to today
First ARPANET connection — his student programmer Charley Kline
The first message was l-o crash
First ARPANET connection between UCLA and ISI at Stanford
Jon Postel
PhD in CS UCLA 1974
MITRE
sri-nic.arpa
Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California from 1977
First Arpanet Connection log
RFC’s editor from 1969 to 1998
Wrote or co-wrote more than 200 RFC’s
IANA founder and head for 30 years — allocated all internet numeric addresses
Administered .us domain
DNS arbitration
Took over the internet in 1998, well 2/3 of it
Only person who has an obituary as an RFC (written by Vint Cerf): RFC 2468: I remember IANA
Robustness Principle (“Postel’s Law”): Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others (often reworded as “Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept”).
Vint Cerf
Vint Cerf helped invent TCP/IP
TCP/IP
Cultural leader
Requiem for the ARPANET
Jon Postel’s obituary RFC 2468 I remember IANA
Larry Landweber
CSNET
First inter-network TCP/IP connection
NSFNET
Dave Clark
MIT PhD 1973
Project MAC
IAB
We reject Kings Presidents and Voting
Vice Chair of FCC Open Internet Advisory Committee
“In 1968, he received his Master’s and Engineer’s degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked on the I/O architecture of Multics under Jerry Saltzer. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1973. From 1981 to 1989, he acted as chief protocol architect in the development of the Internet, and chaired the Internet Activities Board, which later became the Internet Architecture Board. He has also served as chairman of the Computer Sciences and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council. He is currently a Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.”
“We reject: kings, presidents and voting.
We believe in: rough consensus and running code.”
[The origin of the above is notes from my lecture at Tufts University for the Tufts System Administrator’s Affinity Group, 2013-03-28]
Copyright © 2013 Henry Edward Hardy
Did Government build the Internet?
Did Government build the Internet?
A DARPA project manager, acoustical psychologist Dr. JCR Licklider of BBN Corporation, or “Lick” as he was called, had an “epiphany” and envisioned an “Intergalactic Network”. Lick’s Intergalactic Network would include email and remote sign-on that would someday bind together the galaxy, Licklider had his epiphany when he saw the first DEC TX-0 computer, originally developed for Project SAGE.
Dr. Licklider went to his managers at DARPA and received about a million dollars in initial funding to create what became the ARPAnet, the lineal forerunner of today’s internet. The ARPAnet was not open to private individuals working in small groups through voluntary cooperation. ARPAnet was open only to the military, large corporations with substantial military contracts, and research universities receiving DARPA funding.
It was government funding which paid for the development of all of the basic internet protocols we use in some form today such as packet switching in the form of NCP, the predecessor to the TCP/IP of today. DARPA started funding research for ARPAnet in 1969. In 1982, the first inter-network gateway was set up, to CSNET. In 1990, government funding for the ARPAnet ended. Government funding continued for a few years under NSFnet, which funded a “backbone” of (for then) high-speed long distance connections for computer data.
Mr. Johnson would be correct in his statements about small voluntary associations of individuals building computer communications systems if he were talking about bulletin board systems, FIDOnet, or USENET. However, those were not the ARPAnet and did not contribute in a significant manner to the eventual structure and topology of the ARPA Internet.
The New York Times erred in publishing this essay, which is based on statements about the history of the Net which are absolutely and provably false.
sincerely,
Henry Edward Hardy
Senior Systems Administrator
Tufts University*
Author of “The History of the Net”, 1993
NIC Handle: HEH
*institutional affiliation for identification purposes only
The Internet? We Built That
J. C. R. Licklider (wikipedia)
Project SAGE, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, 1950–1963
Memorandum For Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network
Network Control Program (wikipedia)
Copyright © 2012 Henry Edward Hardy
Letter on “Egypt’s Autocrats Exploited Internet’s Weaknesses”
Letter on “Egypt’s Autocrats Exploited Internet’s Weaknesses“
Regarding “Egypt Leaders Found ‘Off’ Switch for Internet“:
Dear James and John,
Interesting article. However, the following paragraph and much of what follows is incomplete or inaccurate.
Because the Internet’s legendary robustness and ability to route around blockages are part of its basic design, even the world’s most renowned network and telecommunications engineers have been perplexed that the Mubarak government succeeded in pulling the maneuver off.
The fundamental “building block” of the Internet is the Autonomous System (AS). Each AS is uniquely identified by an Autonomous System Number (ASN). In short, the internet is comprised of independent networks which voluntarily connect to each other by following the internet standards documents, known as RFC’s (“Request for Comments”).
How do systems know how to route traffic to other systems?
Today this is accomplished via BGP (Border Gateway Protocol).
Generally speaking, each AS broadcast routes via BGP over port 179.
What happened in Egypt is that, on January 28, most Egyptian AS stopped broadcasting routes via BGP, and thus became suddenly unreachable by almost all other internet AS. This was not a mystery to experts or even run-of-the-mill system engineers. It was immediately understood and documented.
How is it you did not talk to a single person with a clue as to what they were talking about? Or, did they know and simply not want to tell you so other governments would not exploit the same technique? In any event, had you googled “Egypt BGP” the answer would have become blindingly obvious to you instead of a “mystery.” The BGPmon post was referenced by at least 105 other blogs in the days following Jan 28, so the information was, and is, widely known and available.
See http://bgpmon.net/blog/?p=450
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_system_%28Internet%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocolbest regards,
Henry
Note: Article was being revised, and retitled, by nytimes as I wrote this letter.
Copyright © 2011 Henry Edward Hardy
Comments on ‘Net Neutrality’
I sent the below to some friends when asked to join a letter advocating “Network neutrality”:
I am generally opposed to any federal or state regulation of what internet service providers can do vis a vis routing and BGP, packet prioritization etc. I do think that telcos should continue to function as common carriers, and that all commercial ISP’s should be required to reveal their packet prioritization and bandwidth clamping as part of consumer protection regulation, rather than being allowed to use the “up to 1.5 megabytes per second fast” kind of formulation in advertising.
There is no capital-I “Internet”. And there has not been since the NSF backbone shut down April 30, 1995. There is merely a loose association of networks who have agreed to share traffic over RFC-documented protocols. Each of the networks is entirely autonomous and self-governing.
It is the autonomous, voluntary, and self-governing aspects of the internet which are most important to preserve, not “net neutrality”. Internet freedom means that we allow other people to do things on their network which we personally don’t like (and may not allow on our network).
“We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code”
–Dave Clark, “An Input/Output Architecture for Virtual Memory Computer Systems”, Ph.D. dissertation, Project MAC Technical Report 117, January 1974
Networks belong to the people who own them. There is no reason that I, as a person who owns a network, should have to pay for additional bandwidth charges to say, backhaul traffic for AT&T or Google over my network if they are not clients of mine, or that I should route their packets over my net at all if I don’t want to. Nor should I have to give a non-subscriber equal priority on my network as say, medical imaging facilities for a customer.
“Net neutrality” is a shibboleth; I think we should avoid using the term and talk instead about “common carrier” status for the telcos and large ISP’s and voice carriers.
Links to previous stuff I have posted on my blog regarding “net neutrality”: https://scanlyze.wordpress.com/?s=net+neutrality
I am posting the above comment also to my blog, https://scanlyze.wordpress.com/
–HH.
Autonomous System (wikipedia)
Copyright © 2009 Henry Edward Hardy
About Scanlyze
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Scanlyze is an online magazine of essays, commentary, satire, and analysis. Were we half as clever, for inspiration we would take Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Swift, Montaigne, or Seneca.
“The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation’s greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us.”
John F. Kennedy, October 26, 1963
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