Maybe people like Dot and Don think of government as a systems-administration sort of job. So here they are, security experts advising the sys admins on things like... setting permissions allocating quotas registering users and giving them passwords (we used to put the encrypted passwords in /etc/passwd, but now we put them in /etc/shadow, with no read permission, so they're safe) deciding what utilities are and aren't available deciding what software the users need, and installing it (grudgingly, based on who's yelling the loudest) setting up connections to other machines deciding who's allowed to log in from "foreign hosts" getting mail set up and running buying new hardware from vendors specifying the hardware to the vendors ... These are the things computer security experts advise on. Maybe hammer experts see things as nails. Only a country is not a host system owned and administered by the government, and citizens are not guests or users. Maybe we Unix mavens are partly at fault for propogating systems that are such good models for dictatorships. -fnerd quote me - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - blue pill, Pharm. a pill of blue mass, used as an alterative... alterative, adj. tending to alter... -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a aKxB8nktcBAeQHabQP/d7yhWgpGZBIoIqII8cY9nG55HYHgvt3niQCVAgUBLMs3K ui6XaCZmKH68fOWYYySKAzPkXyfYKnOlzsIjp2tPEot1Q5A3/n54PBKrUDN9tHVz 3Ch466q9EKUuDulTU6OLsilzmRvQJn0EJhzd4pht6hSnC1R3seYNhUYhoJViCcCG sRjLQs4iVVM= =9wqs -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----