At 08:30 AM 9/29/98 -0400, John Young wrote:
Now that the terrified US Army has axed its Web sites, and NSA and several other mil sites seem inaccessible and "temporarily unavailable" this morning, could this portend a dual-use of the Internet, a closed one for porkbarrell mil and secret gov sweethearts and a sappy infotainment one for civilians to gameboy infofoolery?
Well, for some months now they've password protected some of the more delicate stuff (e.g., "lessons learned", some of the field manuals). And they have been rejecting non .mil addresses too. Certainly we can expect them to eventually get a clue and think about what's out there. Mostly they have. (Of course it was within the last year that a .mil was exporting PGP!) The army's over-reaction is quaint but essentially reasonable --the W3 pages are just PR, and they're real edgy these days after they tried to scalp Osama with a tomohawk. [digression: I wonder when Osama will have his own web page with matching funds for the head of the Great Satan, and whether there would be a shootout on the net, e.g., the DNS records being changed, a phone call to their ISP] As far as the NSA's online personnel records, I bet they're still worried about the CIA shootout down the street a few years back. There's still plenty of names, phones, email addresses in the .gov domain, with building locations, etc. But Jim Bell is locked up so they're not so uptight.
That would be a tri-power-gov implementation of dual-use terror-scare to hide perkbellied privileges of natsec obsession.
They keep trying different passwords to the constitution. Its a dictionary attack: "pedophile", "droogs", "terrorist", "WMD", etc. --Ceci n'est-ce pas un Toto