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U.S. Military To Create Its Own Internet
An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times today reports 'The Pentagon is building its own Internet, the military's world wide web for the wars of the future. ... The Pentagon calls the secure network the Global Information Grid, or GIG. Conceived six years ago, its first connections were laid six weeks ago. It may take two decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to build ...' Members of a consortium formed 9/28 include Boeing; Cisco Systems; Factiva (Dow Jones and Reuters); General Dynamics; Hewlett-Packard; Honeywell; I.B.M.; Lockheed Martin; Microsoft; Northrop Grumman; Oracle; Raytheon; and Sun Microsystems."
Go ahead Uncle Sam, your net will end up being crappier than the privately funded net, and maybe just maybe then you can just spy on your own employees instead of the rest of us. NAH. In any case, this will end up being an inflexible white elephant with the same type of administration you expect from the DMV. After a few years the govt will realize the public internet is actually superior and more redundant and .mil will magically reappear.
At least that's how I see it.
Anybody been paying attention to the mind machine interface? From computer chips that can connect to nerves to allowing quadrapalegics to use computers via electrodes in their brains the advancement of the mind machine interface seems to be advancing at a solid clip. As compared to the stagnation of AI research over the last four decades (especially in regards to a true intelligence as opposed to solving complicated math problems like chess) there is a significant gap. I think that by the time a real AI gets out into the internet and tries to wreak havoc it'll have to deal with a ton of bio-mechanical human intelligences on their home turf. Just my two cents.
00010111 always try everything twice
This is the military equivalent of saying "Here's a $200 billion program to Make The World A Better Place". As with so many other military programs, it throws insane quantities of money at a real problem, with a timeline so long that the solutions will be obsolete before they hit the field, without paying attention to recent successes.
The most successful information sources to the troops in the field in Operation Iraqi Freedom were from agencies who left the alphabet soup of military interoperability acronyms behind, and built effective web interfaces (almost on the fly) which were ideal for their customers on the ground in Iraq.
Army logistics tracking system allowed troops to request and track their re-supply orders via satellite phone as if it was FedEx. The smarter intel systems are looking to amazon.com style customer relationship management systems as the appropriate model.
This was all taking place in an environment where laptop computers in the field were still considered "unauthorized" by the military (fortunately, an edict ignored by commanders). Some of the best Command and Control information systems used were improvised in the months before the war by a few smart techies at the Corp level out of necessity using COTS equipment, since none of the divisions in the initial action had been upgraded to trailers-full of "ruggedized" computer systems of the last multi-multi-billion dollar information system program, Force XXI.
The military has to learn to embrace technological FLEXIBLITY and allow a Bazaar-style of advancement among it's agencies. _READ_ some of this GIG proposal... http://ges.dod.mil/articles/netcentric.htm
if you were constrained to those "Common Operating Environment" mandates, and what will be thousands of pages of specifications and acronyms, you'd never want to develop a line of code again. And noone will, except for the half dozen programmers at over-priced defense contractors who will be well paid to live and breath these standards for the next 20 years.
-bcg
It's called Orion (well Raytheon's part are).
I have walked through their security systems by connecting to IIS (on NT4) running on a remote site and examined exchange (5.5) mailboxes containing classified communications due to one of the numerous URL parsing bugs in IIS4. This was a few years back so it's probably better now.
Be very afraid - these guys don't know how to keep a secret safe. They get given a large manual and after that they're a sysadmin.
You aint seen me! right!
The other thing the military doesn't do is security. They think you make your systems secure by classifying the source code. It's always a race to the bottom to find which is worse, system reliability or system security. This doesn't bode well for an attempt to build a HUGE secure, reliable network.
My prediction: they'll burn through tens of billions of dollars, chew up the careers of a large number of programmers and managers, and the whole idea will fade away around 2010 or so. One good thing; the coding cannot possibly be outsourced.
Anyone who thinks the military is as cool and ultramodern as on tv and the movies is an idiot. Let me put it in a more proper persective for you.
Palm/retnal scanners...nope...a hahahahahahahahahaha...tears.... Let's put it this way I got an email the other day asking me whether or not I had submitted my paperwork to have the email account I've been using for the last 5 years.
Ultra fast internet connections, nope.
Top of the line computers...sure....from 1998. Fiber optic networks...nope...coax and 10bT baby!
Instant file recovery and easy to use multi department integrated data basses...in your dreams buddy.
Super geek wunderman IT guys that maintain and protect our networks....hahahahahahahahahahhahaha..tears..hah
Neeto torpeedo technical orders with revolving 3D diagrams of equipment and buildings with intergrated sensors that can be controlled remotely on a really cool laptop/palmtop....err no. Bust out the TO books and get a wagon...yes I said a wagon we use them to carry tools and the 30lbs of books we need to do our work.
Sealed room containing an alien body...that one is true...well ok to be honest it's made out of rubber but it is in a SAR access only area... is that good enough?
An all powerfull multi-branch force combining sentient software/hardware matrix that will destroy the world by taking over all the weapons in the military. No but I do have to run Adaware everday to clean off all the crap from people surfing the net and playing flash games on government computers to keep it from crashing when I check my email. Not quite as scary as Skynet, but it does annoy the piss out of me.
Any computers holding "secret" or "top-secret" data cannot be connected to public networks in any way, under current procedures. It's the only unhackable way to do it (without sneaking into a secure building), and they know that. They call it an "airwall".
Because of rules like this and a million others, it costs a lot of money to make anything secret. The ammount of information being classified as secret is skyrocketting.
-B
You mean DARPA-net?
That was one good design, but I think the original design team has left. I don't know where they went, though. Certainly not to the internet. They wouldn't have approved of anything with the current number of centralized vulnerabilities.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Isn't is amazing what you can pick up when you actually read an article, even the first couple of paragraphs?
And a couple of others later on...
I doubt that there will be election data on there either. By the way, how to you throw an election over the internet when the voters use punch cards, like 73% of Ohio? TCP/CHAD?
U.S.S.A.
U.S.S.A.???
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
11/13/2004
Chuck Herrin, CISSP, CISA, MCSE, CEH
Author's Note - For anyone who is curious, I have put together this shortened document that will show you exactly how easy it is to break into Diebold's GEMS software, which is the software used to tabulate regional voting results. This software runs on regular Windows machines and counts the votes from multiple precincts that may have used touch screens (which have their own problems), optically scanned punch cards, or other balloting methods. It is responsible for the accurate reporting of tens of millions of votes cast using many different types of ballots.
That's right - even if you used the older systems like punch cards, your vote can still be Hacked when the numbers all come together. Wanna see how easy it is?
I am going to show you, step by step and with screenshots, how an attack against our election system could very easily steal a Statewide or even a National election without leaving a trace. This attack would be easy to carry out, difficult to detect, and exert enormous influence on the results, leaving the humble voter coldly left out of the decision-making process.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
They are building a war fighting and intelligence network. I doubt that they will want civilians, activists, and nuts on "their" internet ...
... Unhappy Socialists Slandering America?
Understandable, but ultimately foolish. Consider that during Gulf War I, we had the fun news stories explaining why the military had turned off the errors in the GPS, because they found that they couldn't get delivery of the mil-grade GPS equipment they needed, so they started buying them from civilian commercial sources.
Also, at least in the early (ARPAnet) days, the mil guys rightly figured out that neither they nor the corporate world was ever going to develop the sort of network that they needed, so they farmed out most of the work to academic hackers. Lots of military folks won't admit it openly, but there was back then understanding (in ARPA) that this was a much more effective way of getting everything tested by people who didn't have to follow orders. We'll probably find (after the fact) that the military network is riddled with holes that every two-bit spy knows how to walk through. But the P2P guys on the open Internet will have become uncrackable by anyone (even the 25th-century security experts in the entertainment industry).
If the DoD folks had any brains, they'd be doing their stuff over the public Internet, and challenging the world's hackers to crack their communications. And they'd publish their code. Then they'd know about problems before the insanity of battlefield conditions. But I wouldn't put a lot of money on them being that sensible.
By the way, how to you throw an election over the internet when the voters use punch cards, like 73% of Ohio? TCP/CHAD?
Nah; we learned that back in 2000. You just use the courts to block recounts. Then it doesn't matter if there's an audit trail. It seems that the Dems go along with this as happily as do the Reps. Even if someone does an audit and reports the frauds, it still doesn't matter. The media just ridicules the paranoid theories without ever bothering to investigate, and everyone is happy that The System Worked.
U.S.S.A.???
Nah; my keyboard stutters, too. Well, mine doesn't repeat 2-char strings, but I'm typing this on a PowerBook. I'd bet that MS has keyboards that can frustrate its users with N-char repeats like this. If not, maybe you can special-order them online. Think of all the typing time it could save.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Instead of redoing the ailing national power grid that would bring in many more jobs than this hidden gem--intelligent I know but not for general use nor for improving the ailing economy.
Is it just me or does The Pentagon think it has a blank check on all matters? Before anyone notes that there will be jobs done may I remind everyone this doesn't improve our security, for the general public. It makes sure that the Government can spy on its citizens more securely.
Too bad so many idiots voted for the Dems and Reps instead of The LP that wants to scale back government to its original intent and coordinate with the private sector to reinvigorate this pathetic economy.
Would we want to build a canal system to protect against floods and drought in the Midwest? Nope! We'll just charge more to the public and keep racking up a debt that will always accrue since Nature will always flood and bring droughts to the Midwest.
Do we want to invest in high-speed cargo railsystems to reduce heavy machinery on highways and make the transportations of products more efficient? Nope! We would rather offer funds to revamp the highest maintenance approach to highway restoration.
Do we want to build consumer commuter lightrails to reduce wasted congestion and traffic? Nope! We'd rather build a top secret Internet called GIG!!
Can people finally acknowledge they are complete door knobs and don't realize they aren't getting shit for a return on their investment via their vote?