Bruce Schneier Founder and CTO of Counterpane Internet Security thinks so. "My guess is that the U.S. military could disable large parts of the Internet, at least for a while, if they wanted," writes Schneier in this month's issue of Cryptogram. "But I doubt that they would do so; it's far too useful an asset, and far too large a part of our economy. More interesting is whether they would try to disable pieces of it. If we went to war with country X, would we want to disable their portion of the Internet, or remove connections between their Internet and our Internet? Depending on the country, a low-tech solution might be the easiest: disable whatever undersea cables they're using as access. Could the U.S. military turn the Internet into a U.S.-only network if they wanted? That seems less likely, although again a low-tech solution involving the acquiescence of companies like Cable & Wireless might be the easiest. One important thing to remember here is that you only want to shut an enemy's network down if you aren't getting useful information from it. The best thing to do is to infiltrate the enemy's computers and networks, spy on them, and surreptitiously disrupt select pieces of their communications, when appropriate. The next best thing is to passively eavesdrop. After that, the next best is to perform traffic analysis. Only if you can't do any of that do you consider shutting the thing down. "
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