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.

Comments

Classified

[Chagatai]

I guess this means that Bush is putting his top secret two-coffee-cans-and-a-piece-of-twine technology to the side for now.

--Chag

What a jackass!

[bytes256]

Notice that this lovely post comes straight from an Anonymous Coward...hmm...anybody else smell the irony of that?

Who needs DoS?

[Ho-Lee-Cow!]

The government is still so busy licking Gates' buttcheeks that they are still running mission critical operations on Windows machines. Outside of DoD and some quarters of the military, all you need to do is get something into a computer behind one of those MCSE maintained firewalls and it's gameover.

Just because no one has bothered to erase hard drives with these vulnerabilities before now, doesn't mean that it isn't coming.

God DAMN IT!

[jcr]

We could have had an uncrackable PUBLIC network by now, if the government hadn't put so much effort into harassing people who tried to publish crypto code.

-jcr