[TriLUG] OT: USA Patriot Act II

Greg gregbrown at mindspring.com
Sun Feb 9 21:59:08 EST 2003


> I wonder what the DoJ thinks about Open Source?  Do you think they have a 
> list of all participants in OS lists?
> 

I don't know if the government knows about all the participants on a
particular OS list (and I"m 100% positive that many lists are monitored
- at least via programs that try to gather data and present that
information statistically).  

Anyway, the Department of Homeland Defense is very interested in what is
going on with the Open Source movement.  There was a large push last
year to figure out just exactly where Open Source is in use in the DOD
(and government as a whole), what it is being used for, and why.  The
information, at this point, is considered to be "sensitive but not
classified" but I wouldn't be surprised if it does end up classified
because everything else seems to be these days.

Anyway, what I can tell you regarding Open Source in the government
space is many, many, many people are very hot under the collar about the
Slammer worm and there are now questions like "why isn't iptables, or
something like it, built into the NT kernel so I can globally filter out
a specific port on every workstation?" to which my answer is "it
wouldn't be iptables or anything like it that would be implemented under
NT.  It would be iptables++, or myPacketFilter, which would have holes
built into it so your machine would be enabled for proprietary
communication with the holders of the source code patents, hence the
packet filter would be useless.  Only when a specific company does not
benefit directly from security software will we ever have an effort to
code and implement a truly secure system on the operating system
level".  I try not to roll my eyes when I say things like this.  

The good news is that while Linux might not gain greater market share
this year or even next I do believe that eventually we will see larger
adoption of Open Source products, or BSD variants, in the Government.

Time will tell.  

Greg





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