US Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) has attempted to downplay a bill that would grant the president authority to shut down swathes of the Internet during a national emergency.
“Cyberwar, in some sense, is going on right now. So, I say to my friends on the Internet, relax…[Because] this is something that we need to protect our country. Right now China…can disconnect parts of [the] Internet in case of war and we need to have that [capability] here too,” Lieberman, a co-author of the bill, told CNN.
“[So], we need this capacity in a time of war. We need the capacity for the president to say, ‘Internet service provider, we’ve got to disconnect the American Internet from all traffic coming in from another foreign country, or we got to put a patch on this part of it’.”
