I am reasonably sure this can't be done. No single organization has the power to block traffic en mass. The Internet is global. There are millions of routers on foreign grounds that can send packets to routers here in the USA. It would be impossible to command all those routers to stop sending packets from Afghanistan. The whole nature of packet routing doesn't really allow for traffic control at such a level. If a router doesn't know what to do with a packet, it ships it to a different router that does. Basically, those packets will keep on jumping around the Internet until they find a router that will take care of them (or the packet's Time to Live, TTL expires, which at 254 hops, the default, is a lot of hops to find a router that cares). Furthermore, there is not any technology out there working at a macro level to say "hey you're a packet from Afghanistan, you go in the trash heap." We cannot practically put firewalls on every possible data line into the USA. Seeing as how most firewalls melt down on heavily loaded T-1s, I cannot imagine putting on on an OC-48. It would probably burst into flames. Not to mention the fact that Osama could very easily call a friend in Germany to send the email for him from an ISP in Germany. Now how would we stop that? It would be coming from a German address? Sorry. ------------------------------------ Andrew Plato President / Principal Consultant Anitian Corporation (503) 644-5656 office (503) 201-0821 cell http://www.anitian.com Yahoo Messenger: Anitian ------------------------------------ -----Original Message----- From: HORN Dan E [mailto:dan.e.horn@private] Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2001 5:18 PM To: CRIME@private Subject: Bin Laden use of Internet The world knows that Bin Laden and his followers used the Internet to formulate an attack the US (shame on him). But to allow him to use it in a similar manner to formulate another attack on the US would be (parden my use of the term) same on us. Maybe I am to simplistic in this line of thought, but, why can't we simply have the Internic block all Internet traffic out of Afghanistan? Lets assume (I don't like that word either but...) that Bin Laden is the ring leader, and that he makes all of the major decisions and that his followers simply wait until they are told to do something. If this assumption is true and Internet traffic was not allowed out of that country then Bin Laden wouldn't be able to communicate to them (using this technology), and they (the sleepers) would simply continue to sleep. I know the Internet was designed to exchange data but don't you think we should change the rules during times of war? Another question: How is Bin Laden able to send out his messages during this time of war (don't we want to keep is cry for help limited)? Is he using satalites, if so can't the data being received on the statalite be either blocked or tapped? Thanks, Dan
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