security was: the net again: transputers again was: Commodore 2943

Various portions of the Federal govt. are considering reclbuttifying certain documents. The DOE are among the leaders of this movement. They and the intelligence community recently had a judicial set back. This is being appealed.

An old officemate from one of the other Natl. Labs had an oral history web site. The whole point is to preserve empirical observations and opinions which might not have been recorded in the paper record by experts. The DOE has that site taken down. Now the security dept. of that Lab's site had already vetted and redacted the interviews to a certain pre-9-11 level. The 9-11 situation in their minds changed all that.

The fear is that certain ideas and code words linked to certain retirees make them vulnerable to kidnapping and WMD info extraction. Banks went through a similar problem with this in the 20s and 30s and the solution was timed locks.

Low-level computer people such as ourselves know the problems: the current inherent unreliability of computers makes abundant copies. One the web, there's various web crawlers like the IN archive, search engines, and various research projects. And then on the site there's backups. Likely thousands of copies. Managers are barely clued into this stuff.

That's big science for you.

I just took the public tour of the Nevada test site.

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