FBI seeks rerouting of certain traffic

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

ccb writes:
| Cool!  Take down a couple of these "choke points" and you've nuked the
| internet!

Yup. Maybe what we should be doing is teaching a history lesson.  Way
back  when  the  US  Defense  Department's  ARPA  (Advanced  Research
Projects Agency) started funding development of what we now call  the
Internet,  one  of  the  oft-quoted requirements was that the network
continue to function under battlefield conditions.  This  meant  that
the  software  had  to  deal with multiply-connected machines (hosts,
gateways, routers, whatever), and if a path failed, the routing would
automatically  switch to alternate paths.  The idea was that if there
existed a path between two machines, the network would  automatically
find the path and deliver messages.

We have had more and more violations of this.  The  commercial  world
prefers  to avoid redundancy for cost reasons.  And programmers often
ignore  the  multiply-connected  cases  because  it's  more  work  to
program.   All  these  are  violations  of  the Internet's design and
intended use.

The FBI's proposal is directly aimed at  weakening  the  Internet  by
creating  critical  "choke"  points  that can be disabled by a single
bomb (hardware or software). We should be making a big point of this,
and demanding that the Internet's redundant, fail-safe design be kept
despite the desires of organizations (commercial and  government)  to
control the traffic.

Maybe a good analogy for those who don't  understand  packet  routing
would  be  the  old comparison with highways.  We have a huge grid of
streets that give you a lot of alternate paths.  Suppose that the FBI
were to persuade the local highway departments to install barriers so
that all traffic is routed through a  single  intersection,  so  that
they  can  look  into  the  vehicles for criminal suspects.  So to go
between any two points in the greater Boston area, all  drivers  must
first drive to the Pike/I93 interchange, and then drive from there to
their destinations.

This sort of explanation could get the idea across pretty fast.