If This Had Been An Actual Emergency

saridder writes "In an increasing attempt to regulate the Internet like the current PSTN, the US Government has asked the IETF to come up with a system to prioritize government and emergency worker traffic in the event of another disaster, much like the GETS system already in place for the PSTN. It's interesting to follow, because it's only an RFC, so you don't have to follow it. I probably won't be prioritizing government traffic on any of my routers." The story has a link to the ieprep working group if you want to get involved or comment. Perhaps this is a better way than GOVNET.

Comments

However . . .

[cjpez]

. . . wasn't most of the problem just with the major news sites? When all hell broke loose last September, the majority of the "net" seemed to be functioning basically as usual, and it was just the news websites that were being hit.

Were there other problems I just didn't notice? I'm guessing that the government won't need to have priority access to cnn.com if something like that happens again.

Heck, even then, the servers themselves seemed to be the bottleneck. Load levels were pegged beyond comprehension, but I was under the impression that the infrastructure itself held up well. Once again, I could be entirely mistaken about that.

Re:However . . .

[.sig]

Actually, if you believe the popular idea, the government actually does get a lot of it's information from sources such as cnn. It makes sense, as the only time they would need their own news-gathering source would be for classified issues. After all, more often than not the media is the first group on the scene for any occurance.

Re:However . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, even the intelligence agencies get a lot of their information from civilian agencies. For example, one NIMA installation I know of used to have/has televisions mounted out in the halls tuned to things like CNN so people can get quick updates to things going on in the world. Conspiracy theories aside, the intelligence agencies don't know everything that is going on in the world (or else the planes wouldn't have hit the Towers in the first place).

Re:However . . .

[Happy go Lucky]

On 9/11 the Emergency Broadcast System here in the USA was not used AT ALL. WHY?? Because the news channels knew what was going on before the government.

Not quite true. The EBS is mainly intended for "All people downstream of the Lake Pueblo dam, move to higher ground immediately. The dam is breached" or "A tornado has been sighted in the southeastern corner of Arapahoe County, moving northeast at about twenty-five miles an hour. All persons in the area of Blah Blah Blah take cover." EBS isn't just a news substitute. Thats what Denver's (lack of) all-news AM stations are for.

All this talk of emergency communication networks is bogus. They just need to feed information to the news outlets like they always do.

Again, negative. They serve two separate purposes. The news is to inform the public. The EBS is to get very-high-priority, extremely time-sensitive stuff to specific parts of the public. Emergency communications are generally not for public consumption at all.

Emergency logistic communications (like the prioritized email, I'm guessing) are for things like "We need at least three additional ambulances at Fourteenth and Clark" or "We need a dozen more cops at the hospital to keep order" or "Can someone have the Red Cross bring soap and blankets for about five hundred people to City Hall?"

As for tactical communications, we need something to say "two-adam-twelve, two-adam-sixteen, back door's open. Can you send a King unit around this way?" Our radio channels are not designed to have eighty or a hundred cops working on them at once, plus explorers and volunteers. Even with one channel used for nothing but wants checks and one specifically planned for special events, we'll swamp our dispatchers very quickly. Email and internet won't do a lot of good there, unless we need to coordinate with another agency and they have to talk to a dispatcher twenty miles away from ours. It doesn't happen very much, but when it happens you NEED that capability.(As an aside: That was a big problem at Columbine High School a few years ago. There were a half-dozen tactical teams that were simply not equipped to talk to each other.)

For instance, during 9/11, we went into shock when the first plane hit, just like everybody else on the planet. When the second plane hit, I was just getting out of the shower and getting ready for bed (graveyard shift) when my cellphone range and I was told to gear up and get my ass back to the office. I don't watch TV, and rarely listen to the radio (except for "Car Talk" on NPR on Saturday mornings) and so the EBS wouldn't have told me anything. An email might have gotten to me, but it turned out that the cellphone was the easiest (for most of us. About half of the department doesn't have email and most of us deliberately avoid television news, as a mental-health measure.)

Sounds good in theory

[Alizarin Erythrosin]

But I don't think it would really work well in practice, unless it becomes government mandatory. Seems to me that it's like blocking spammers or virus spreading, you actually have to make the sysadmin care to do this.

The problem I forsee is how are they going to identify these high priority packets and data transmissions? If they just flag it with a special flag, how long before some haxor figures it out and suddenly everybody has high priority /. reading or pr0n surfing?

If I'm right...

[Have Blue]

...doesn't TCP/IP already have a system for prioritizing packets? Which no one (especially no router) uses for the obvious reason: It's too unregulated and too easy to exploit, especially if you let just anyone onto the net like today.

If this system goes through, all that will happen is that every single packet on the net is a priority-one red-alert packet and the routers will just start ignoring the priorities (again). There is no honor on a completely public medium, don't forget what happened to the idea of open relays.

sounds like..

[raindog151]

sounds like they should just build their own damn secure network. considering this is a resource (not yet) 'owned' by one person, why the hell should they get priority?

sorry, awful things happen. get carrier pigeons.

Not the most important...

[Rev Snow]

On 9/11, the most important communications did not come from the government. They were the cell phone calls to/from the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania. I'd hate to think that those lifesaving phone calls among private citizens might get squeezed out because giving the governor an update on resuce efforts took priority.

Preserving end to end is more important

[gdyas]

As I see it, preserving the end to end, nondiscriminatory nature of the internet backbone is more important than any current concern about national security or natural disaster response. Creating preferences for any group, no matter how worthy the group or the motive, undermines the essence of what makes the internet a good network and creates opportunities for abuse. Just to touch on a couple points & questions:

• Is There Even A Problem? After our most recent large-scale disaster, 9/11, the internet was one of the networks that had absolutely no problem coping with increased data traffic. Both the POTS and wireless phone systems were overloaded quickly, but the 'net kept chugging along with all due speed. So if everyone's being served quickly even during that large disaster, what's the problem you're providing this solution for? Also, what has been the magnitude increase in state & federal government internet traffic during 9/11 and previous disasters? Is the internet even a minor source of emergency communications? In the face of existing priority access to the phone network, is it even necessary?
  
• Potential For Abuse. Nevermind the local/state/federal flunkies who suddenly realize their goatsec.x is too precious to travel on the non-expedited internet. What I'm worried about are the 3133t HAXX04S out there who're going to have this preferred network busted in a matter of days. All this internet Red Phone system would do is create a federally funded cracking competition, grand prize being superfast uploads.
  
• Feature Creep. It starts out being just for emergencies. Then it's just so damn convenient, the state/local gov't uses it all the time. Next, it gets to where everyone down to your city alderman has preferential net access, for no other reason than they've got a gov't job. I know, it sounds funny, but I don't doubt the possibility of it occuring. It eventually becomes one connection speed for important people (as determined by your friendly neighborhood Federal Bureaucrat) and one speed for the rest of us. And why? Refer to point 1 above.
  

In the future we'll see lots of this. We'll see people coming to us or to the gov't with lots of good reasons for discriminating content on the net. National security. Preserving copyright. Stopping kiddie porn. All putatively good motives, but nobody's seeing that the cure, perfect network control, is worse than the disease. It puts innovation in a box and lets our current interests and concerns block what can be done with the internet in the future, and in return all we get is a network that's little more than a fancy mail-order catalog.

if face == spite (nose = 0);

Bravo to the gov on this one.

[glrotate]

Following Internet protocol. Asking for an RFC from the IETF instead of congress passing an unworkable law.