Of Course Trump Could Break the Internet, but Should He ?

The first true social-media-era terrorist organization, Daesh, skips and skims through the Internet, using it to set fires in Paris, San Bernardino, and beyond. It’s a terribly difficult strategy to counter, and once again, in his ham-handed way, Donald Trump is opening up an interesting debate with an initially

impractical idea to counter it. Trump’s initial statement in the December 15 Republican presidential debate was that “I would certainly be open to closing areas where we are at war with somebody.” He later dialed it back to imply more conventional hacking, spying, and cyberwarfare, but of course it opened up the questions of whether we can shut down “their” Internet—and whether we should.

In a fascinating investigation, Der Spiegel figured out how Daesh gets its online access: through satellite dishes purchased in Turkey and connected to EU satellite providers. Those dishes all have GPS locators on them, so Der Spiegel figured out where they are. According to the publication, “Many of the satellite dishes are located in Aleppo, Syria’s second city, which isn’t completely under the control of the terror regime, but other locations of the dishes include Raqqa, the unofficial IS headquarters, al-Bab, Deir al-Zor and along the Euphrates River into Iraq and the IS-occupied city of Mosul.”

The locations of the satellite dishes are known. The ISPs are known. They could be shut down, if these ISPs chose to do so. So why don’t they? There are other, more arcane ways to dump traffic from IP blocks and make ISIS’s life difficult. But such solutions, advocated by Trump, Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart.com, and others rest on the dangerous assumption that the Internet is “our Internet.” To some extent, that’s true for now; U.S. companies have an inordinate amount of control over the naming and routing of Internet servers and traffic. But that’s an accident of history, and it’s not a fixed fact.

The Chinese government has established, essentially, an Internet just for that country, with filters around its borders. We in the Englishspeaking world seem not to marvel at that daily because China’s Internet is in Chinese, we can’t read Chinese, and they aren’t particularly interested in exporting their homegrown services. But China already broke the Internet, in China. American influence over the rest of the Internet has been maintained by a quiet agreement that the folks doing it so far have done pretty well, and that breaking it for reasons of national pride or control—unless you’re China—is more trouble than it’s worth. But as soon as a U.S. president starts unilaterally blacklisting chunks of the Internet, other countries will feel abused and colonized, and they’ll break their own Internet. There will be a European Internet, and a Russian Internet, and a Middle Eastern Internet, all with their own policies and their own controls, and there will be no more global market for our U.S. software and services firms—never mind the end of the radical global free speech decade we’ve been having.

Breaking the Internet that way is a one-timeonly deal. Daesh could rebuild its connectivity, tapping into the Internet connections in neighboring states and concealing its location more artfully. We would never be able to rebuild our influence, or the overall freedom of the Web. The Der Spiegel article proposes a smarter idea. “Perhaps the companies have full knowledge of who is using their services and are sharing that information with intelligence services. That would mean that intelligence services have been listening in for years, even as IS continued growing in strength.”

The Internet is not a one-way path; it’s a valuable source of intelligence from which we would be cutting ourselves off. There are forms of cyberwarfare we can conduct without shattering the entire Internet, as well. Targeted viruses can be sent in to cause chaos, the way Stuxnet (a joint Bush-Obama project, if you can believe that) apparently did in Iran.

Cyberwarfare is an invisible and often secret capability. As we fight against an Internet-native enemy, it has to be a core capability—and yet, its successes are often not made public. There’s no satellite-viewable carnage, no YouTubed bombings. In other words, you have to trust in the competence of the government that is conducting your cyberwarfare campaign. You have to trust it will be not only aggressive, but more technically competent than its opponents. One of the top questions for this year’s presidential candidates should be: Whom do you trust to do so?