Wait, Wait -- So Pakistan or Iran or Russia Could Crash a Major Internet Site That Easily?

Over the weekend, most Americans ran into the mildly alarming problem of YouTube being kaput for more than an hour, preventing millions of people from watching "Star Wars According to a Three-Year-Old." It didn't seem all that much more worrisome when we realized that YouTube was down because the Pakistani government tried to censor it inside Pakistan and made some kind of mistake that crashed the whole thing. It was accidental, like when a squirrel chews through a power line and blacks out a neighborhood while getting charcoaled in the process.

But now the realization is seeping in that if Pakistan could do this by accident -- any government might be able to do it on purpose. "To be honest, there's not a single thing preventing this from happening to E-Trade, or Bank of America, or the FBI, or the White House, or the Clinton campaign," Todd Underwood, a vice president at Internet company Renesys, told USA Today.

A massive and terribly geeky discussion of how it happened has been ongoing on Slashdot. It includes this comment: "I imagine that this event will introduce a lot of people to how high level internet routing works. Yes, its that vulnerable folks. Scary, but fortunately these events don't happen often. I think back in late 90s was the time when someone in Pennsylvania introduced a global route for everything to go to 0.0.0.0, which brought everything down for a day."

Hold on -- so Pennsylvania once brought down the Internet?

Yeah, so, all in all, this is pretty alarming. Why the heck is Iran bothering with nukes? It seems like it should be able to find a way to bring Google to its knees, paralyzing life in the United States in the process. We have no idea whether the U.S. government is looking into Sunday's YouTube outage, or even what part of the government should do so. But, no joking, isn't this a national security issue?

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