by Flemming Funch
The Bush administration apparently has a plan for building a centralized system to enable broad monitoring of the Internet, and, potentially, surveillance of its users, through arrangements with ISPs. The proposal is part of a final version of a report, 'The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace', set for release early next year.Mitch Ratcliffe says, and I agree: "This is sheer idiocy, because it will actually increase the risks to the national information infrastructure. From its inception, the Net was conceived as a distributed system that could reorganize around failures (in the case of the original designs, the Net was built to route around damage caused by nuclear weapons). Centralizing all network communications to facilitate surveillance will create a huge, ripe and easily attacked target, reducing the reliability and performance of the Internet on the whole and for each individual user. Likewise, the plan would invade the digital borders of other countries, creating many conflicts that don't impede communication today." Well, if it happens, we'll have to route around that particular damage. The U.S. could no longer be allowed to contain the central hubs of the Internet, and we'll just have to encrypt more traffic. ... Note: the next day the White House issued a clarification, saying the plan is not finished and it will not necessarily include monitoring of individual e-mail. Yeah, sure.
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