On Lawfare, Timothy Edgar advocates that you learn all about Masha Gessen, a journalist-survivor of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Shortly after last week’s election of Donald Trump as president, she published a remarkable essay, Autocracy: Rules for Survival. Her number one rule? Believe the autocrat.
Whether or not Trump becomes an autocrat will depend on whether Americans finally begin to take the things he says seriously. If he does not mean them, let him say so. Don’t dismiss them because you think they are foolish or funny or because you simply do not believe what you are hearing.
So what has Mr. Edgar unsettled? He provides this link, where Mr. Trump is documented to have said,
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump just said the US should consider “closing up” the internet to curb radical extremism. Trump, a man that routinely claims everyone in charge of the US is stupid, believes that as president he could just call up Bill Gates to help him shut off the internet. Trump floated the idea at a campaign rally at the USS Yorktown in South Carolina tonight as a way to stop ISIS “jihadists” from recruiting Americans to commit acts of domestic terrorism. The idea is so dumb it almost has us, too, at a loss for words.
“We’re losing a lot of people because of the internet,” Trump said. “We have to see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what’s happening. We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas, closing that internet up in some ways. Somebody will say, ‘Oh freedom of speech, freedom of speech.’ These are foolish people.”
Mz Gessen’s number one rule is reminiscent of (apology, apology) Adolf Hitler, who infamously (if reportedly incoherently) published his plans in Mein Kampf. However, I hesitate to take the lesson to heart, as I’m not so sure Stalin, Brezhnev, Andropov, Nikita Khrushchev, or many others published their plans; Hitler may be an exception. However, there is a great advantage to that simple honesty – those who are desperate and looking for earthly salvation may find it in those honestly spoken plans, and by implementing them, you guarantee their loyalty. A little honey on the knife, as it were.
So what tool would Mr. Trump use in the event? Mr. Edgar is a lawyer and expert in cybersecurity, and thus he knows about Section 606 of the Communications Act of 1934. His opinion on Mr. Trump’s options for shutting down the Internet?
Section 606 has never been applied to the internet, but there is nothing in the law that explicitly says it cannot be. The question is whether the government’s statutory authority over traditional telecommunications under 606 extends to the internet. The issue is similar to the question of whether the FCC can use its regulatory authority to impose “net neutrality” rules under other provisions of the statute. In June 2016, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld the FCC’s power to impose “net neutrality” rules.
If Trump wants to “close that internet up,” all he will need is an opinion from his Attorney General that section 606 gives him authority to do so, and that the threat of terrorism is compelling enough to override any First Amendment concerns. It is critically important that a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee ask Trump’s nominee, Senator Jeff Sessions, what he thinks about this issue.
If such a thing happened, would the corporations have the clout to force it to be re-activated? Would the citizenry riot? Or would they be too stunned? Or even in favor, as some trumped up (apology, apology) excuse is given?
I am provoked to think about why Trump was elected (barely), as in the large number of Americans in desperate economic straits, with various others – Trump has said he’ll bring back all those jobs, so let’s assume he’s going to try. What if he fails? Do those folks give up on him in 4 years, or vote for him again because of his honey-smooth approach with them? How do the Democrats generate an appeal to them while holding their coalition together? It should be quite an interesting dance, starting just about now.
