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Bush Wants an Unhackable Private Network
Slur points out an article at the New York Times which says that the "Bush administration is considering the creation of a secure new government communications network separate from the Internet that would be less vulnerable to attack and efforts to disrupt critical federal activities," writing "It seems to me money would be better spent getting the next-generation Internet going, for the government to fund more of the existing research and standards boards to create protocols that are invulnerable to the kinds of attacks the government seems to fear, namely massive DOS attacks. Or is there something else a 'net terrorist' could do to 'disrupt the vital flow of information'?" Isn't hard-to-disrupt communication the reason that DARPA got involved in this "Internet" business anyhow? Update: 11/19 22:48 GMT by T : This was mentioned before a little while ago when USA Today wrote about the same concept, but apparently a Digital Pearl Harbor is still being flogged.
According to The American Institute of Physics in their Physical Review Letters journal article "Resilience of the Internet to random breakdowns" (19 Oct 2000) [a copy of this article is available in .pdf from my personal web page on the left side bar for your reading pleasure.] stated that the Internet could lose 99% of its nodes, and still maintain routability. The content lost in those 99% of nodes is another matter, but the Internet would not segment until over 99% of the routing nodes were removed. That's pretty impressive.
the government already has several separate, secure internets, for various purposes, and they were still infected by Melissa and LoveLetter
Now that's something we didn't see on C|Net.
I worked in the aerospace industry from '86 to '92. Every big defence contractor had one or more classified IP networks. Unfortunately, the security measures imposed were sort of stupid: the ethernet cables of the classified net had to be at least so many feet from a phone line (they were worried that induced voltages from ethernet would allow someone on the phone to "tap" the classified net), keyboards attached to computers attached to the classified net couldn't be traded out to unclassified areas, and had to be elaborately destroyed when they broke. At the same time, you could walk through checkpoints with pockets full of floppies.
It was as if a Korean War Drill Instructor dreamed up ways to actually impede using the classified network, but at the same time allow (possibly) classified information in and out of the building.