Dr. Paul S. di Virgilio, University of Toronto [log in to unmask] said: > ... I have seen > some pretty powerful maneuvers way beyond nastymail on the internet > which lead me to believe that those causing the disruptions have > access to some very high tech equipment. Of course, we scarcely know > what some of the agendas really stand for. ... In a later post, he said: > ... It is clear by the number of events > that we see that someone needs to collect and correlate the > data looking for common threads and common protection. There > certainly are enough traces here to find footprints on the > internet. My concern is that there seems to be a correlation > between internet and external events. Is this the desired > effect? ... Let me preface this by saying that in high school I was top 40 in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, and once, while a grad student at "Teller Tech", I had an employeeship tinkering on computers at a (U.S.) nuclear weapons design lab (LLNL), of the sort which was a cornerstone of Internet, and now is apparantly working on computer network security... It has been suggested that Ed "father of the H bomb" Teller (of LLNL) faked a missile interception test on the Star Wars program, faking out both the Russians and the U.S. Congress... I am not surprised by the fact that, during a "Cold War", the most powerful telescope ever built and put into space turned out to be "nearsighted", just because of a single wrong number, and a decision not to test it to save a million dollars on a billion dollar bird. Just remember, that a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) telescope that points up, will later in that orbit point down, and the data is probably not encrypted on the downlink, and thus will be seen by some forces as a security risk. I am also not surprised that the "internet worm" was coincidentally started by the son of a NSA Computer Security professional. $100M in downtime was just what it would take to get people to put passwords on their accounts, and close the holes in their security system. Just remember the German hackers that were attacking Internet on behalf of the Russians. The 3 above mentioned single landmark events during the last decade all involved large U.S. Government "owned" hardware systems (remember--Internet is USDOD's own "turf"), all resulted in outcomes which benefitted U.S. "national security", and all involved decisions (if this view is correct) by a small group of individuals. Please consider that not all attacks on our systems are necessarily by anarchists, luddites, or industrial spies. Some may be by those who feel that they "OWN" the system. You must also understand that the U.S. Military Industrial Complex often runs 3 decades ahead of what you can buy on the street. (As a recent example, the perfume that you can buy today as "Realm" is the sort of pheromone that the CIA would have killed for in the '50's, but allegedly, as stated on MacNeil-Lehrer a week or two ago, spent 3 decades sitting in some corporate freezer.) (BTW keyword searching of international USENET traffic should be much simpler than the purported telephone voice keyword recognition that the U.S. NSA is reputed to have on US telephone sattelite uplinks, therefore it must be considered to be being done. You can bet that NSA is having "cat fits" about some the data that is "loose" on the internet. And, what do you suppose the new U.S. "industrial security" program is about?) How does all this relate to Listowner security issues? Well, mailing lists are now under attack (e.g. by those trying to post commercial messages). What I see happening is that the $8-20/hr commercial services feel threatened by widespread access to *free* internet, and will therefore politically act to cut U.S. internet funding, while offering to build a (National) Information Superhighway. Of course, what is unstated is that this highway will have tollbooths, in order to pay these same providers to build it. The National Security Community will sign off on this, in order to have real-time connection-data, wiretapping, and data encryption backdoors built in to the specifications by Congressional mandate. However, be able to be allowed to rebuild a system, one must first break the current system. Thus, Internet will be broken, sometime just about the time that it becomes as popular as Citzen's Band radio was at its peak, and the links become saturated (e.g. by newcomers using graphical database programs for fun), to the extent where the current sponsors become dissatisfied with the return on their investment. In short, the argument is that it is in the political interests of both "Big Technology" and the U.S. security community to "break" internet as it now exists. (These forces may, however, underestimate the impact that such regulation may have on the forces of innovation and technological advance.) Why oppose the decisions of the "patriarchs"? Because the patriarchs tend not to make decisions that are against their own interests, and as such, have a tendency to create liberation movements in the wake of their decisionmaking. These are inherently political decisions, about who wins and who looses in society, about who has access to information and capital, about who gets risks and who gets rewards, and about who gets social justice and who does not. Internet, like the "Old West", will be tamed. Eventually, it will look like our other utility systems. In the mean time, listowners, like "Old West" sheriffs, should expect to be under attack by both "outlaws" and "robber barons". If listowners do not respond adequately to these attacks, regulating the net from within, then more powerful forces will legislate the solution from without. It is even conceivable that powerful outside forces may precipitate such attacks. Replies that are not list-related should be sent directly to me. Stephen A. McFadden [log in to unmask]