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US Cyber-Czar makes a sound suggestion

Will wonders never cease

The man who repeatedly disgraced the memory of thousands of US Sailors who died horribly in a Japanese aerial bombing with trite blather about an "electronic Pearl Harbor" has come around with a fairly sound idea for inter-governmental secure communications.

Richard Clarke, America's once and future Cyber-Security Czar, reckons it would make sense for the gummint to develop a closed loop in cyberspace, imaginatively dubbed GOVNET, which, unlike the Internet, stands a decent chance of actually being secured.

He made these comments as he accepted the post of top cyber-cop in the Bush2 administration yesterday, further extending a shadowy career in official spookdom stretching back to the Ford administration.

Numerous government and defense agencies already have secure networks which don't communicate with the perennially sketchy Internet; now Clarke would develop a way to connect them, and include agencies which lack a secure means of inter-connection with the rest.

It seems Clarke has finally noodled out the rather obvious fact that the Internet was cleverly engineered from the ground up for the express purpose of exchanging data, not securing it.

A secure Internet is a pipe dream. A secure network for government communications, on the other hand, is not. Perhaps if Clarke succeeds with GOVNET, the securocrats will lay off the Internet as their pet venue of terror and evil, and get on with more productive security efforts.

Well, ya gotta dream.... ®

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