http://www.freedomdomain.com/cia/ciainternet.html
THE WAR ON THE
INTERNET HAS BEGUN
Revolt brewing against
government control
When the major defense and intelligence contractor SAIC in
1995 bought the small Herndon, VA company that has
the government
contract on name service for the entire Internet, alarm
bells
went off all over the Internet. The move would give the
intelligence community complete control over the Internet. They
could, in essence, black out the entire
Internet with the flick
of a switch. Or, they could subvert the Internet
by falsifying
information in the root level domain name servers. A real-time,
clandestine censorship of hosts with troublesome information.
Those fears came
true last week when the SAIC-controlled
servers started returning false information
in response to
automatic host lookup requests. For many hosts on the
Internet,
the name servers simply claimed that they did not exist.
Name servers are used
every time a web browser or an email
program looks for a host on the Internet. The servers
are the
phone directory for the Internet, listing the Internet number for
every host. The
top level servers, that keep information about
the structure of the entire directory, are run at Internic
which
is an operation of Network Solutions Inc., owned by SAIC Inc.
SAIC past and current board members
include such intelligence
community notorieties as Bobby Ray Inman, former director of the
National Security Agency, deputy director of the CIA, director of
national security contractor E-Systems, and
Clinton defense
secretary nominee; Robert Gates, the former CIA director
under
George Bush; current CIA director John Deutch; Anita Jones,
Deutch's former Pentagon procurement officer, and
William Perry,
the former secretary of defense.
It is possible that a simple
technical problem is the cause of
the erroneous information
currently supplied by Internic name
servers, but it seems very unlikely. First, root
name servers
have run on the Internet for almost 30 years without
problems.
The server software is tried an tested. Second, Internic charges
such exorbitant prices for its services, $50 per
listing per
year, that it can easily afford a
completely fault-tolerant
system that is infallible. Estimates for revenues of the Internic
reach $60 million for just one year of
running the root name
server.
Operations staff at Internic did not respond to a
Washington
Weekly request for information on the nature of the problems.
The poor quality of
service, the high prices that it charges
from every host on the Internet, and the monopoly status of this
government contractor has spawned outrage on the Internet, which
is now in near revolt. Several
groups have started offering
alternative top level name servers that bypass the
government
registry completely. These groups advocate a free market solution
to Internet name directories, with system administrators choosing
from a number of
competing name servers on the Internet. One
group is Alternic at http://www.alternic.net/,
another is eDNS at
http://www.edns.net. A press
release from one of the groups
behind these efforts is included in the Information section
of
this issue.
In China, the government
last year required all Internet
users to register with the police,
facilitating government
control of this potentially dangerous medium. In the
government instead requires Internet users to register
with a
government national security contractor.
Published in the
Copyright 1997 The Washington Weekly (http://www.federal.com)