Wired: Congress to Enter ICANN Fray

Fri Mar 15 09:37:03 UTC 2002

> When did the Internet become CENTRAL to national security????  Mildly
> important? Sure.  Central? No way!  I think Senator Burns is mistaking
> national security for political security therefore he must DO SOMETHING
> about the problems at ICANN.

I suppose it depends on what you define as national security. The 
smooth running of government is important to national security
and you will find that in nearly every facet of government the Internet
has started to play a major part, atleast for email, but much more
in some cases. The problem with this is that most of these changes
haven't been as well co-ordinated as they might have been, so when
there is no Internet figure out the processes to get basic things
done doesn't exist. The deployment of  email for many organisations has been
unplanned i.e. it was switched on one day. The backup systems/processes 
for when its down don't exist anymore or aren't kept uptodate. Even
international inter-government issues are dealt with over the
Internet now. So in my view the Internet is important to national
and probably global security. Which I think everyone on this list
should be somewhat happy about.

Regards,
Neil.