On Thu, Feb 27, 2020 at 8:44 AM Joel M. Halpern <jmh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
While technically commercial use of the Internet for non-governmental
purposes was not supported in the 1980s, in practice it occurred. From
the mid-80s, I worked for a company that got Internet access through
MRNet, used that for commercial interaction with the government, and
also used it for other commercial and non-commercial purposes.
I think for the purposes of Stewart's original comment, the difference
someone drew between soft and hard control is important. The
government9s) clearly had soft control over the Internet for much of
that time. (It would be pretty foolish for me to argue with Mike over
that.) At the same time, the ISO OSI example was a case where the
government (and then other groups) tried to exercise harder control. And
it failed. Which aligns well with how hard it has been to get folks to
adopt IPv6, and yet we are making progress.
Yours,
Joel
If you work on communications technologies, you are going to receive the attention of people who make it their business to observe communications. That is simply a fact of life.
But what folk don't seem to appreciate is that it is people rather than institutions that do things. Institutions don't have agendas, the people working for them do. And so it is usually a mistake to attribute intent to the alphabet soup of three letter agencies. One hand rarely knows what the other is doing.
Times change and so do agendas. The concerns of the cold war are not the concerns of today. Sometimes parts of the TLA agenda coincides with our agenda and sometimes parts are opposed and most often both are the case at the same time.
I have been pushing the use of Threshold cryptography for several years now.. Some parts of the federal govt. oppose it because the last thing they want is better end-to-end crypto and some parts are pushing for adoption because it is the tool we need to address insider threat.
