Once again, just two weeks after the Colonial Pipeline was disrupted by a cyberattack perpetrated by internet pirates or privateers located in Russia another cyberattack has been launched against a United States governmental agency. Whether this is with the backing of the Russian government or not these attacks are internet piracy and should be considered acts of war by Russia and need to be taken seriously and dealt with seriously.

While they are not killing people in this country they are disturbing the flow of commerce, costing millions of dollars, demanding ransom, and affecting government operations in this country. Clearly the Russian government is either responsible or not policing its citizens to the degree necessary to stop this activity.

Acts of warfare such as these require reasonable and proportional responses. Until such time as the Russian government can prevent these pirates from using the internet for cyberattacks, Russian based internet nodes must be entirely removed from internet access to the United States. This can be done

The internet is in general controlled by non-governmental organizations. Actual internet address are assigned and managed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). This world-wide authority, is based in Los Angeles, and allocates internet addresses to regional internet registries. Basically this agency knows (an publishes) listings of where specific ranges of internet addresses are assigned. Certain blocks of internet addresses have been assigned to a Russian agency which distributes them in Russia.

While our government (eg intelligence agencies) may not be able to correctly correlate specific internet addresses with specific entities within Russia, we know precisely which internet addresses are located in Russia.

Data on the internet moves on a backbone of cabling and satellite connections (transmission media) and routers. The routers are the devices that direct data across the different transmission media. The routers for all internet traffic between the United States and foreign entities are located in the United States are operated by companies headquartered in the United States and are subject to United States laws.

While the actual governance of the internet is no longer controlled by the United States Government, as it was in earlier years, our government has the absolute right to govern the operators of internet backbone routers in the United States.

Other countries are able to block specific internet traffic and so should we.

To stop Russian based cyberattacks, President Biden should declare that since Russia allows and may perpetrate internet piracy, he will issue an executive order to force the operators of routers within the United States from fowarding data inbound-from or outbound-to all internet addresses assigned by IANA to Russian control.