From: Anonymous <nobody@replay.com>
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1998 13:58:07 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: No Subject
Message-ID: <199809291848.UAA28989@replay.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



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