Deliberation of "National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace"

An anonymous reader writes "Per the Federal Register the National Infastructure Advisory Council will have a public meeting (telephonically) from 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm EST on 1/8/2003 to deliberate on the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace. 'Written comments may be submitted at any time before or after the meeting.' Details can be found in text format or in PDF."

my hopes...

[small_dick]

Something like a condom or shield over comms coming into the USA or going out...and MORE freedom under the shield (USUS) communications.

Please let there be some tattered shred of freedom to hang onto...it's terrible about 911 but there have been worse death counts in history with no enemy to fight...the "Death Fog" in London (1952?) comes to mind.

Good move by gov't

[SixDimensionalArray]

I usually object to government interference, but for once I think they're really on track here. If you read the draft document, available here [whitehouse.gov], you'll see that the government really wants to keep its hands off as much as possible, but also realizes the fundamental need for central control for security.

It's nice to see they also want to work with a strong public/private partnership, not solely one with private organizations. I'll try and be listening in for sure!

federal register tips

[squarefish]

I print this every day for my boss and find it easier to just look at them rather than try to use the search function on their page. You can find the listings here [gpo.gov]. of course next week you'll just change the 2 in the url to a 3. we are usually searching for grant opportunities- this looks pretty interesting, I think I'll have to start looking for similar items.

Re:*Ahem*

[Lumpy]

Attention American Government Officials: ...

1 - Remove your heads from your asses.

That is asking WAYYYYY too much from any of our government officials.

The only person in government that I had ANY respect for was Gov. Jesse Ventura. he was the most HONEST politician this country has had in over 100 years. and the only one with balls and knows how to use them...

No More Fscking Gore Bashings

[Nazmun]

I know you meant it as a joke but the statement Gore made related to the internet and his involvement in it is completely true. He did NOT say he invented the internet and believe me when i say that there is a good chance if he did not do what he did, you wouldn't be posting on slashdot now. Infact the internet would probably not have come so far had it not been for Gore.

The following is from Vint Cerf, if you don't know who he is then you really shouldn't have ever bashed gore:

"As Vice President Gore promoted building the Internet both up and out, as well as releasing the Internet from the control of the government agencies that spawned it. He served as the major administration proponent for continued investment in advanced computing and networking and private sector initiatives such as Net Day. He was and is a strong proponent of extending access to the network to schools and libraries. Today, approximately 95% of our nation's schools are on the Internet. Gore provided much-needed political support for the speedy privatization of the Internet when the time arrived for it to become a commercially-driven operation."

There *is* no backbone

[billstewart]

A long time ago, when the Internet was still the Arpanet, there was a backbone, because that was the easiest way for different routers to find each other, though there was sometimes other connectivity in local areas - not the kind of thing that could actually survive a nuclear war or even a well-planned collection of car bombs, despite all the theory about being able to route around damage. The current commercially-run internet doesn't have a backbone, and there's vastly more diversity. Depending on who's gone Chapter 11 this week, there are one or two dozen big "Tier 1" ISPs that carry the bulk of the traffic in the US and from the US to Europe and Asia. Most people are familiar with the big peering points like MAE-West and MAE-East, but in practice somewhere between 95-99% of the traffic between the Tier 1 ISPs is carried on private peering connections, though most of those are in the same cities as the big exchange points. I'm not sure how much of Europe's traffic is dependent on LINX and AMSIX, and while KPN-Qwest may have carried about 1/3 of Europe's traffic before its bankruptcy, it's dead now, with the traffic moved to other carriers. Asia seems to be a lot less centralized, except for the Great Firewall of China.

An important part of network design is understanding what traffic is going to "nearby" locations, and designing things so most traffic stays local and doesn't use expensive or scarce facilities - things like putting big hulking routers in San Francisco and San Jose so traffic between Silicon Valley companies stays in the South Bay and Multimedia Gulch companies stays in the City without needing to use too much bandwidth around the Bay, much less sending copies of all of it on three-part-carbon forms to NSA's Fort Meade, Ashcroft's J. Edgar Hoover building, and Dick Cheney's stockbroker before delivering it.

That doesn't mean that there weren't rumors from reputable sources a few years ago about active wiretaps on MAE-West sending extra copies of some packets to somebody else, or that the Russian renamed-KGB's 1998ish SORM [dfn.org] (another URL) [libertarium.ru] project didn't try to force Russian ISPs to build a full-sized wiretap feed to them (at the ISPs' expense, of course) or that there aren't Eurocrats [heise.de] trying to do the same thing in their countries today. And then there's the whole Echelon Wiretapping System [echelonwatch.org]. But it's still impractical for them to force ISPs to deliver everything everybody's reading or emailing, though I'll be happy to send them copies of most of my spam if they'd like.

On the other hand, the publicly-accessible parts of the web aren't all that big. The Wayback Machine [archive.org] has a copy of all of it, with reasonable samples going back a long time, and Google [google.com] and the other search engines crawl it periodically, and AllTheWeb.com [alltheweb.com] presumably claims to have All The Web.