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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group
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To: LindyBill who wrote (62415)12/20/2002 5:25:45 AM
From: D. Long  Read Replies (1) of 281500
 
Upon second reading Bill, this sounds harmless. It reads like the Feds want to do a big version of what every ISP already does for their own networks - monitor traffic.

The article makes a number of references that make me believe this is harmless, even potentially quite beneficial: the reference to the Critical Infrastructure Protection Board, network operations center, guage overall state of network, etc. Any ISP larger than a mom and pop shop has a NOC (network operations center) which monitors network bandwidth usage and other metrics by "polling" routers and putting the info together into pretty little graphs. Then network guys sit around and watch the graphs and pick out the telltale signs of trouble. That's what I did when I worked at UUNET. Here's a little example of some MRTG graphs:

stat.ee.ethz.ch

So what it sounds like, is the Feds want to put together a public/private venture that would be like a whole-Internet NOC, sort of like a big traffic monitoring center that could see the Big Picture and hopefully pick up on attacks on the network as they happen. That can be done by only monitoring certain network and transport layer data "traps" configured at the major hub routers. It would be impossible to monitor user level application data in this fashion because it isn't conducive to graphing, routers don't peek that deep into packets, and if they just wanted to dump everything going over the network they run into the practical impossibilities I raised earlier.

I hope this is all that is being proposed. Fairly innocuous.

Derek
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