All the “international sovereignty” responses are humorous to anyone whose paid attention to the last twenty years of the American military.
How do you imagine that a drone will be able to find and damage an underground cable?
This is not Afghanistan, a drone will not live long past China’s/Russia’s air defences.
I have no doubt the US has plans to cut them (and probably anyone else you can imagine) off in the event of war.
So it might not be a great idea to start doing stuff like that in their back yard? ;)
Is it technically feasible? Yes.
Next, consider that the authority of US sovereignty ends at US borders. The US legally cannot unilaterally do anything to anything outside of its own borders.
Next, consider that both North Korea and more importantly China have no damns to give about what the US wants.
Next, consider the first point again. Any actions made domestically can and likely will be circumvented by people who do not agree with them. An obvious example is people running their own DNS servers configured in defiance of US government orders.
So to answer your question:
Is it legally feasible? No.
Is it politically feasible? No.
Is it logistically feasible? No.
Is it physically feasible? No.
Is it good that this isn't feasible? Yes.
Tell me you haven't worked in network infrastructure without telling me you haven't worked in network infrastructure.
> Next, consider that the authority of US sovereignty ends at US borders. The US legally cannot unilaterally do anything to anything outside of its own borders.
I mean, sure, officially, when all laws are followed and in a friction-less plane this is correct. However the United States does all kinds of shit unilaterally outside it's own borders, literally all the time, not the least of which every war we've been in post WWII, and incalculable numbers of other tom-fuckery carried out on all levels of secrecy and non-secrecy by all manner of organizations identified by three letters, most commonly the CIA.
Am I wrong, though?
>I mean, sure, officially, when all laws are followed and in a friction-less plane this is correct. However the United States does all kinds of shit unilaterally outside it's own borders, literally all the time,
You can just say we went and blew up Nordstream, you know.
Yeah. Congestion makes a single-node Internet unusable.
Laughably wrong. The rest of your comment was ignored for good reason.
There are some good reasons people have given here why we aren’t doing it, as I suspected, but I’m sure borders aren’t on the list.
Europe (2): RIPE and Netnod AB. RIPE is Europe’s RIR, run as a conference by European ISPs. Netnod is a Swedish ISP.
Asia (1): Project WIDE, part of the Tokyo Institute of Technology.
US (9): Verisign, Cogent, NASA, US Department of Defense, US Army, the University of Maryland, ISC (as in the Bind9 people), ICANN itself, and the University of Southern California.
The last two seem to have some overlap and there is probably a lot of overlap between all of these organisations.
Verisign runs two root servers which is why the list has twelve entries but the root servers run from A to M.
It’s not, but it mostly is, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of other centralised components — hardware, cables, numbering, protocols — were similarly organized.
You might want to have a look at the political history of Iran. lol
Who said america owned the internet? NK is american's enemy, america is in an active state of war with NK if you don't know. The korean war is active but in a cease fire situation.
I'll admit that "War" is a somewhat colloquial term nowadays, for better or worse.
tl;dr answer is "Eh, its not so simple." but you're right on a basic level.
No, the North Korean ballistic missiles have from my non-classified understanding a range of around 1000 to 3000 KM. The best-case scenario ranges that are sabre-rattled are certainly theoretical. They do not have ICBM capability and are not capable of launching an ICBM or exiting the Earth's atmosphere, but they do threaten Japan.
Strike capabilities reaching North Korea do indeed exist. All three legs of the nuclear triad may strike a North Korean target, but airplanes must sortie from the Pacific (leaving them vulnerable to detection, interception or suppression) or follow the course of a land-based ballistic missile strike which by necessity must pass over Russia, China, or maybe possibly India. Although there is no reason to think that an Indian airspace pass would be a feasible possibility in my view.
As you mention we do have ICBMs that are capable of striking basically and literally anywhere on the planet. This is not really enough, because those ICBMs must pass through many, many layers of enemy strategic defenses.
From a nuclear arms point of view, its likely that our longest range reach-out-and-touch-ya' weapon systems really need to carpet-bomb entire regions and cities to achieve their designed operational objective. In effect, we're going to lose too much accuracy as well as ordinance to shoot-downs, reducing our effectiveness in the vicinity to a near minimum. Minimum lethality is quite lethal, but considering a maniacal super-villain's armored bunker really and truly is what we need to begin constructing a realistic view of the challenges set forth here. This analysis completely disregards the possible side effect of poisoning Seoul, South Korea with nuclear fallout as well as triggering a chain reaction of thermonuclear retaliatory strikes in a horrific reprisal of the 1914 assassination of the Austro-Hungarian Prince Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.
In short, its in a tricky spot. Luckily, the most danger they (North Korea) pose is to local Pacific naval operations, intense cold-war era artillery bombardment of South Korea (Seoul) or the possibility of a regionally effective ballistic missile. In addition to these threats, they also pose cybersecurity, money laundering and counterfeiting risks and of course, their people are starving in a totalitarian hell-hole regime.
I hope that one day there is an end to the pointless suffering of the people who live in North Korea.
Hypocrisy and delusion are powerful weapons against the uninitiated, but we are initiated, aren’t we notepaf0x90?
WW2 never ended and Russia is still at war with Japan as they never signed a peace treaty.
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-japan-peace-treaty-ukraine-in...
Just like in Vietnam, the stated goal was to replace the government - in this case, to remove the Taliban - that's why you created the Afghan National Army and their flimsy democracy. All told, the US has spent $8 trillion and several thousand young men on the GWOT. Once the US pulled out, the Taliban strolled back into Kabul.
$8 trillion will reduce the US debt by 25%, or pay off all student debt, or build 80 million $100k homes. Wasted, and the only thing you have to show for it is nothing tangible, except more vibrant terror groups, and immigrants flooding Europe. Meanwhile, 8k US veterans die by suicide yearly.
You had the firepower but failed to achieve your political goals. Just like in Vietnam, Iran, Syria, Laos, Cambodia, and more countries than I care to mention. While ruining the lives of innocent millions, of course.
So, you failed. Admitting it might be hard, but it will bring the US to a place of humility and help you avoid adventures like this going forward.
And to be pedantic, no you can't raze every sq. km of 652,860 km². Assuming, even just 1000 tons of explosives per km2, that's nearly 700 million tons of explosives. At $30k a ton, you'd be spending $21 trillion on enough explosives.
You are blaming the US for that?
Arbenz in Guatemala, Allende in Chile, etc.
Haiti: Historian Hans Schmidt notes that, “US Navy ships visited Haitian ports to ‘protect American lives and property’ in 1857, 1859, 1868, 1869, 1876, 1888, 1889, 1892, 1902, 1903, 1904, 1905, 1906, 1907, 1908, 1909, 1911, 1912, and 1913. Finally, tired of all those round trips, the U.S. occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934."
Among others, in the 1980s, a Guatemalan military that received U.S. support carried out scorched earth campaigns that massacred upwards of 200,000 mostly indigenous people [1].
And that's before you count all the other American-trained and armed military juntas that systematically murdered, tortured, and raped millions of dissidents "leftists" with Uncle Sam's blessing.
Wikipedia has an entire page on it: go take a look. [2]
[1] https://repmcgovern.medium.com/decades-of-us-intervention-ha.... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
Every leftist country will either be undermined secretly (Europe), will have fake elections to overcome this problem (Latin America), or endure another fascist coup.
In Europe this fascist US backed coups happened until the 70ies. Now the press is enough to vilify citizens and workers rights.
We gave up and left for political reasons. Any humiliation was self-inflicted.
Afghanistan, Vietnam, Iran (now a rabid enemy), Iraq, Syria, and Libya, are all failures of that World Police ethos that the US refuses to disengage from.
All it does is transfer money to the contractor doing the digging (in America's case, the military-industrial complex) while everyone else becomes poorer.
$8 trillion has been spent on the War on Terror so far. Like I said in another comment, that's enough money to build 80 million $100k homes, or reduce America's debt by 25%, or pay off all student loans, or build 400,000 KM of high-speed rail at $20M/km, or give every American taxpayer a one-time check of $48k, etc.
Every bomb dropped on Afghanistan or Iraq was money diverted from something else useful the US could have done.
Does it? So far millions of traumatised and in various ways challenging to deal with refugees are in Europe.
Even in America, I imagine there are many other budget priorities competing for a limited spook-fund, that would displace a "national censor-wall but indefinitely inactive and secret just in case we need it someday."
The State Department has been using the internet (and anonymization tools like Tor) to organize dissidents in foreign countries for various purposes, often coups. One example is the Arab Spring[1].
I'd wager they are very afraid of someone doing it back to them, and might have some capability in place. Even if it's just to shut the internet off for a time (like Pakistan and other nations have done during elections[0], maybe in response to US interference) or perhaps prevent connections to other nations/the rest of the world more generally.
[0]https://www.accessnow.org/campaign/2024-elections-and-intern...
[1]https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13169/arabstudquar.35.3.0255...
For one, they're would be an enormous backlash if it were to somehow effect the many American businesses which rely on network access and have significant clout in our system. Most of the countries that have tried such things either (A) don't have the economic exposure or (B) limited the outage-scope to zones without the same stakeholders.
Another aspect is that such coarse interruptions are a lot easier to accomplish through a bunch of NSL-weilding lawyer-agents contacting ISPs, rather than spending money building dedicated hardware infrastructure, in advance, in secret, to support a Giant Red Button.
I'm not saying there's no possible Motive, but it's no substitute for Means and Opportunity.
https://www.wired.com/story/north-korea-hacker-internet-outa...
You will have to cut cables going to Russia (and\or out of Russia) and China at least.
Not to mention wireless comms.
Also DPRK is threatening Seoul and Japan, not the USA.
If you are just using the term generically and mean other satellite connections, maybe, but limiting them to satellite internet only where we couldn’t take out a dish would certainly be crippling to the crimes I’m referencing!
I never thought about it like this but it’s the largest open air prison on earth.
> cut North Korea off from the Internet, how hard would that be to do? Could we just knock out a few cables?
> Is this just not logistically feasible?
Even if you were willing to block Russia and China from "the internet" (lol) it would be nearly logistically impossible.
Even if you were willing to destroy all sense of privacy and track every single packet sent (what a terrible dystopian idea), there's still going to be ways to fake this. It would only make it harder, not impossible.
Do you think that the only place north korean hackers operate from is inside north Korea?
North Korea pretty much only uses the Internet for scams Or to make money in violation of sanctions. They certainly don’t allow their citizens to use it for anything else, and they don’t allow their citizens to leave the country because they would never come back.
Even if it were only temporary, suddenly cutting off the Internet to the country would expose all of those remote workers to the people who employ them and don’t realize they are employing North Koreans when they all disappear at once.
Is this just not logistically feasible? or are we just too afraid it would be unpalatable to our allies? I can’t be the first person who has thought of this.