2) There has been ZERO concrete examples given of situations that would necessitate use of this new power and why. The Patriot Act was a response to terrorism yet has been used exclusively to investigate money laundering for organized crime. Because this is also a law against an unspecific fear and not against a highly specified vulnerability, what this law will actually be used for is anyone's guess and, like the patriot act, its true use will be invented much later.

3) This IS the authoritarian Great Firewall. Giving the president the power to kill parts of the internet is the SAME THING as allowing executive branch agencies to arbitrarily filter specific content.

4) Coercing ISPs to install traffic-control gateways controlled by the executive branch is the legitimization of domestic spying.

5) It's an unnecessary expansion of the department of Homeland Security to include a cyberwarfare branch. The Department of Homeland Security is quite possibly the most wasteful branch of our government. Homeland Security contracts have been some of the worst of the worst of pork-barrel spending.

6) Lieberman is a tool.

Where I stand, giving to one person the power to completely disable the primary and most efficient way of communication is frightening and awful.

The reasoning behind it? We can stop communications from attacking countries in times of war.

The reality is that there are many other modes of communication for the kind of 1 to 1 communication an attacker would need, but there are far fewer ways for the type of 1 to 1000's communication activists and thinkers need.

As soon as the world knows you have a kill switch, any organized attack will have domestic components, and which means that you still have the possibility of the president screwing up the normal economy, but no additional defense.

And so, why would it be a good idea? That's still what I haven't hear. (It also sounds like your justifications differ from Leiberman's–he's interested in the communications aspect.)

Also, given the atrocious way in which Patriot Act powers have been abused, let alone the manner in which illegal telecom surveillance has been completely ignored (silly people, prosecution of criminals is only for citizens, not government agents!), why exactly should we given Lieberman the benefit of the doubt on these issues at all? Lieberman has failed to investigate any of those issues despite chairing the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs. What else does Lieberman have to do in order to convince us that he does not respect civil liberties at all?

But I do have a question: Would "shutting off parts of the Internet" really work to deter cyber criminals? I honestly don't know the answer, but would love to hear it.

For patients requiring treaments to stay alive, there are generators at every hospital and ambulances to pick up patients in dire need. Even taking your ludicrous scenario of total US power outage attack at face value...oil will still continue to burn without the internet. :D

Isn't it likely that in the event of actual cyber-sabotage, private-sector experts might discover the attacks first, and share countermeasures rapidly among themselves, without any participation of the (slow-moving, often ham-handed) White House and Defense Department?

Might the existence of this bill's new power -- and followup requests to formalize it in automatic systems -- encourage cyberspace national defense planning to over-rely on crude traffic kill commands to the private sector compared to other defense-in-depth?

I'm much more concerned with how "emergency" is defined. Ideally I'd like to see both executive and judicial involvement in mucking around with the net, since in addition to defending the nation under attack you are also effectively constraining hundreds of millions of people's civil rights in various ways at the same time. That's a little too much power for one schmuck and anything that might be called an emergency.