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Re: Homeland Security now wants to restrict outage notifications

  • From: Eric A. Hall
  • Date: Thu Jun 24 15:06:38 2004

On 6/24/2004 11:57 AM, Scott McGrath wrote:

> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/24/network_outages/

http://www.securityfocus.com/news/8966 is the original, for those of us
who have our doubts about the register as a news source

To summarize:

  there are existing FCC requirements to report major voice outages

  the FCC ran a proposal up the flag pole to extend this to data and
    wireless networks

  DHS did their job by analyzing the proposal and suggesting that it
    might not be a good idea to make the additional data too public

  Further: "If the FCC is going to mandate reporting, the DHS argued,
    it should channel the data to a more circumspect group: the
    Telecom ISAC (Information Sharing and Analysis Center), an
    existing voluntary clearinghouse for communications-related
    vulnerability information, whose members include several
    government agencies and all the major communications carriers.
    Data exchanged within the Telecom-ISAC is protected from public
    disclosure. "

Presumably the FCC will take this opinion into consideration and weigh it
alongside clear-headed debates as:

> this country is becoming more like the Soviet Union under Stalin every 
> passing day in its xenophobic paranoia all we need now is a new version
> of the NKVD to enforce the homeland security directives.

At least the paranoia is right

-- 
Eric A. Hall                                        http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols          http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/