GOVNET In the Works

gtg010b writes: "According to USA Today, the U.S. government is considering a private network to be used for all government communications. This network would be "separate from the Internet to keep it safe from hackers or terrorists" according to Richard Clarke, the head of the president's "cyberspace security adviser." Whatever happened to government not being above the people?" Clarke is the guy who's been crying "cyber Pearl Harbor" for a few years; apparently if you cry wolf long enough you get promoted. His request (.doc format) is informative. I should point out that the U.S. military already has such a network (I'm not even going to ask why the Feds can't piggy-back on it), so GOVNET would be for critically-important government agencies like the Department of Agriculture to communicate.

Comments

Re:This is bad why?

[MikeyNg]

So, they want to set up an intranet for the government. Why is this a bad thing? Should all corporations be required to use the internet for any and all communications between employees/remote sites/customers?

This is not a bad thing. It's a redundant thing. If you read up on DARPA and the creation of the Internet, you'll see that all that's being proposed has already been proposed some forty years ago or something. So commercial entities have the majority of sites on the Internet now. Big deal. The Internet was initially created just to handle this sort of thing.

Yes, if they want to do videoconferencing, etc., they'd need to beef up the bandwidth. You'd need something like an Internet2 or something like that. Oops. That's already in the works, isn't it?

(As an aside, when's the last time anyone used a .mil address? They're still valid TLDs, right?)