Could President Obama soon gain the power to shut down the Internet? This is a question that has vexed security experts, legal scholars, and bloggers across the Web for the past week, ever since Cnet’s Declan McCullagh made public a leaked draft of S. 773, a cybersecurity bill currently pending in the U.S. Senate. Buried in the bill are a series of vague provisions that, depending on how you read them, can be construed as giving the President the sweeping authority to seize control of any computer in the United States.

In an opinon essay on CBSNews.com, writer Bruce Henderson observed that S. 773 “has unleashed a flood of criticism on how [the bill] would give the government a ‘kill switch’ for the Internet.”  But other experts have expressed skepticism toward such claims. According to Simon Ou, an assistant professor in computing and information sciences at Kansas State University, “the Internet is composed of a large number of small networks, both in the U.S. and abroad, that are interconnected through various networking protocols. I don’t think any one nation has the authority or capability to ‘shut down’ the Internet.”