Government Ponders Future Of Y2K Command Bunker

Anonymous Coward writes, "Well, not exactly a bunker: '[T]he eighth floor of a nondescript downtown building a few blocks from the White House,' which now contains about $9 million of computer equipment that has no real use so far as Y2K goes. Since Y2K was not the meltdown that was anticipated, read about their quandary in this Associated Press article."

When the command center was announced last August, as explained in this Reuters article, the government's idea was that post-Y2K, the center would serve to coordinate "future cooperation between key infrastructure industries and the federal government to protect communication networks."

The government certainly has a vested interest in keeping communication networks functional; the question is, how vested? Especially with the recent talk of ever greater (and more explicit) governmental oversight of Internet traffic and activities, I'm not sure I want any more observation posts than already exist.

On the other hand, it seems likely that government involvement in Cyberspace will increase dramatically, and soon. Is there some way that this command post could play a vaguely positive role in that involvement? Or does it smack of a open door to ever-more-pervasive observation and tracking of personal behavior?

Comments

Government Involvement in the Net

[wnissen]

The fact is that most of the infrastructure for real-world utilities is owned by the government or otherwise substantially controlled by it. This comes about either through the incredible investment needed (e.g. interstate highway) or some need to have a monopoly control (e.g. broadband spectrum). This infrastructure is absolutely critical to the functioning of American business. Imagine if a large section of the country lost electrical power: the consequences would be horrific. Like it or not, the Net has become almost as important as electricity to corporations. The government, for once, does not have control over a vital resource, which I think is a good thing. However, the government is not used to not having control, and in any case its corporate constituents are very concerned that no one has control. Thus the government is going to take steps to try and reassure themselves and the corporations that someone is taking care of it. I say let them have their little bunker, and let the Net and the admins use their own protective measures.

Walt

Political ignorance is the real problem

[ATKeiper]

A major battle is brewing over infrastructure (especially Net) security, as law enforcement officials clamor for stronger laws and businesses demand government keep its clumsy hands off.

The most serious problem, however, is that politicians and policymakers here in Washington do not grasp even the most basic technical ideas propelling the information revolution.

In other words, the conspiracy theorists who long believed that the government would use Y2K (and the Y2K "bunker") as an excuse to dismantle American institutions had it backwards: we are not in danger of elite or intelligence government agents making decisions, we are in danger because the government is financially and technologically muscular, but philosophically and intellectually malnourished.

A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society

Top 10 things to do with an old Y2K command bunker

[Mike Schiraldi]

First post to suggest linking these computers into a Beowulf cluster?

Anyway, here are the top ten things you can do on a Y2K-command-center-cum-Beowulf-cluster:

10. Solve the 50-city travelling salesman problem
9. Solve the halting problem
8. Run a Gameboy emulator within an C64 emulator within a Mac emulator within DOS installed within a VMWare partition on Windows NT installed within a VMWare partition on Linux
7. Calculate all the digits of pi
6. Find the first occurance of the current Linux source in those digits
5. Compile Mozilla in less than 8 hours
4. Trounce team Slashdot on distributed.net
3. Forget "globally coordinated" - DoS Yahoo to its knees all by yourself
2. Open up a Quake cafe
1. Execute a while(1) { } loop in six seconds