[Air-l] networks

[Steve Jones]

At the risk of taking this somewhat off-topic, I'd wonder whether 
operating in this fashion would, in fact, make an organization more 
vulnerable to discovery. The notion of distribution via 
Internetworking, to my knowledge, involves concepts like 
store-and-forward, copies of information shared at all nodes, etc. 
One of the problems with "early" (in quotes because it wasn't that 
long ago) forms of Internet legislation in the U.S. was that it 
wasn't clear whether all of the nodes through which a pornographic 
image, for example, were equally liable under the law, because all of 
them would, by virtue of having a copy of the image, be "responsible" 
for its distribution. Would it be desirable for a group seeking 
secrecy to operate in such a fashion? It seems to me to run counter 
to the level of secrecy one would want, and that it would be better 
to have nodes that were actually independent of one another, or at 
least not very well informed of the others, so that if one _is_ taken 
down the others to which it might in some way be connected are not so 
easily discovered. Perhaps the notion of "network" as it's being 
applied here isn't quite the same as we've understood it in terms of 
the Net, or I'm misunderstanding its use in one or both of these 
contexts, or it's being used metaphorically?

As to organizations like the ones housed in the WTC, Christian makes 
an interesting comment. I suspect most of the ones that were using 
computer databases had multiple backups, some of which were well 
beyond the WTC, possibly even in other countries. Why not similarly 
distribute personnel?

And if I may be allowed a bit of tongue-in-cheek, perhaps "distance 
learning" could in this way come to mean sending faculty to teach 
from Hawaii while their students remain in Chicago.

Sj

>This is right on. I would also suggest that this attack will probably
>accelerate calls for organizations to become distributed networks with
>regard to personnel as well with regard to computers--who wants to come in
>to a central office location when such are a more attractive target. These
>accelarated calls should also accelerate technology to make such personnel
>distribution possible--video-conferencing technology and the like.
>--Christian Nelson
>
>"Prof. Andrejevic" wrote:
>
>>  Has anyone else on this list been struck by the parallel between the
>>  current portrait of de-centralized terrorist networks emerging in the
>>  media coverage and the organizational logic of distributed computer
>>  networks? Certainly both forms of networking emerged with a similar
>>  goal in mind: a resiliance to the forms of centralized large-scale
>>  attacks characteristic of warfare in the first half of the 20th
>>  century. Redundancy and de-centralization are defensive structures
>>  whose effectiveness is demonstrated by the fact (reported yesterday, I
>>  think) that despite the destruction of something like 10 percent of
>>  Manhattan's office space, suprisingly little data was lost. In the face
>>  of this kind of distributed networking, the type of military response
>>  envisioned by Bush/Cheney et alia seems disturbingly out of joint. Just
>>  as we wouldn't imagine that we could take down a network by hitting a
>>  node, so too does the goal of "taking out" Osama bin Laden seem more
>>  symbolic than effective (to the effect that it works to proliferate
>>  cells of resistance, it might even be read as counter-productive). I'm
>>  wondering if there's some way to use the commonly accepted discourse on
>>  computer networking to shed some light on the current debate over the
>>  appropriate U.S. response to the recent acts of terrorism.
>>
>>  _______________________________________________
>>  Air-l mailing list
>>  Air-l at aoir.org
>>  http://www.aoir.org/mailman/listinfo/air-l
>
>--
>NetscapeCommunicator4.73Win3220000502
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Air-l mailing list
>Air-l at aoir.org
>http://www.aoir.org/mailman/listinfo/air-l