[CII] welcome to the public CII

[Paul Schmehl]

Interesting.  Your comments suggest some questions.  At what point does 
something become CII and for whom?  If a power company is attacked and 
goes down, so that a large segment of a population is without power, one 
would presume that the issue is critical to that group of people.  But is 
it to the global community?  I guess that depends on your POV.

In the final analysis perhaps no one thing really is critical if all 
others can function without it.  Often politicians seems to think of the 
internet in binary terms, as if it were possible to "turn it off" if it 
were "under attack" (China comes to mind), but can you really turn the 
internet off?  And if you can't, what part(s) of it, if any, are truly CII?

I can see this being a difficult topic to enclose within any logical 
terminology to which all might agree.

--On November 27, 2009 10:37:11 AM -0500 Avri Doria <avri at acm.org> wrote:

>
> Hi,
>
> I had thought to lurk not to reply to the first welcome message.  But
> having seen you all reply figured i better before someone decided that I
> was bot.  I don't think I am, but if you all decided I was I might get
> confused, so figured I would put a non-bot stake in the ground.  BTW, is
> this a new variant on the Turing Test?
>
> In any case, on the substantive side of what this list may be about.  I
> also, am not sure I know exactly what CII covers.  There are the logical
> entities people point to, e.g. the names and addresses, and there are
> the physical resources that one points to, e.g. backbones and last
> meters.
>
> In my research work, I work on networks for communications challenged
> areas and try to assume a network where none of the things that people
> normally assume are critical are available. Now this obviously involves
> communications gear and software of some sort, but i look to minimize
> what is necessary from the well known set of things.  This is an
> extreme, but I think it corresponds to the original goal of the Internet
> - a network of networks that continues to work even if some part of it
> is missing. I.e I think the original concept of the Internet intended
> for there to be little if anything that was truly critical - i.e.
> without which the network would not work.  the questions becomes if
> nothing is in itself critical, is there a set of things of which some
> must be there, but no individual member of the set is necessary.  Or are
> thee things that are really critical in all places at all times.
>
> In my avocation, I work with those who have elevated the one naming
> architecture and the bifurcated addressing structure into global
> imperatives, i.e. things without which the Internet would fail and hence
> could be designated as CII.
>
> And in a part time contract, I work in a political environment where
> anything anyone wants to control is called CII.
>
> I tend to exist somewhere among these points of view, trying to come up
> with technology that minimizes the need for any infrastructure that is
> critical in that it can't be worked around yet accepting that there are
> working assumptions that make something critical at some place in some
> time frame.
>
> So, I look forward to this conversation, but am not sure I have a lot to
> offer other then my questions and existential angst about things.
>
> a.
>
>
>
>
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> http://isotf.org/mailman/listinfo/cii
>



Paul Schmehl, If it isn't already
obvious, my opinions are my own
and not those of my employer.
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