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The Europeans mock us. The Koreans boast a claim they are the world's most wired country. Finland is bringing broadband to reindeer. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) published in their 2009 statistics the U.S. now ranks 15th among the group's 30 member countries for broadband subscriptions. This is down from 12th in their previous study. No way! Is the United States actually that far behind the world in broadband deployment? Should the home of Cisco Systems, Brocade, IBM, and HP hang our heads in shame at our inability to deliver a world class communications infrastructure? Geography and Statistics Well, we shouldn't hang our heads in shame, however there is ample opportunity to further develop our national broadband infrastructure. |
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 The headlines are no surprise to those in the Internet business. "Police in Central China have shut down a hacker training operation that openly recruited thousands of members online..." (AP) We've know China, Russia, and several of the former Soviet block countries are the source of sophisticated hacking, and those activities have at least been tolerated, if not directly supported, but the host governments.
The recent dispute between Google and China's government brings another question into the breach - does a national government have the right to censor or control the flow of information in or out of the country? While China may be in the news, citizen journalists in Tehran have been severely punished for attempting to Tweet, email, blog, or transmit cell phone images outside of the country. Under the umbrella of national security do countries like Iran have the right to control that information, or develop teams of professional hackers to go out and look into the accounts of residents and citizens? Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA): To amend title 18, United States Code, to make clear a telecommunications carrier's duty to cooperate in the interception of communications for Law Enforcement purposes, and for other purposes.
DCSNet, an abbreviation for Digital Collection System Network, is the FBI's point-and-click surveillance system that can perform instant wiretaps on almost any communications device in the US (Wikipedia)
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Vietnam is in the process of upgrading the entire country's IT system. With support from organizations such as the World Bank, Vietnam is rebuilding not only physical infrastructure, but also starting from the ground up building new IT systems - including a large scale virtualization strategy.
Hawaii may not be so progressive. The first line of an Associated Press story on Hawaii's lack of a functional IT strategy goes like this: "In many ways Hawaii's government runs its computers like the Internet age hardly happened." (AP) The story goes on to expose Hawaii's lack of IT policy, the fact they are using old systems, a mixture of Apple and PCs for individual users, have a 1960s version of disaster recovery (offsite physical diskette storage), and other parallels with industry that add more discouraging evidence to Hawaii's IT shortfalls. |
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CTC Lab 
