Firewall USA to Firewall China

At the meeting on saturday the idea of a Firewall USA was discussed.
Here's a quote from Jim Clark CEO of Netscape on the idea of a Firewall
China, just for comparison.

Q: The Chinese government has declared its intention to filter out
  what it considers to be objectionable material from the Internet. If
  you were a consultant for the Chinese government, what technology
  would you recommend that they use to do that?

  A: A lot of people think that's not possible. It's difficult to enforce,
  but it's certainly possible. A corporation has a so-called fire wall -- a
  single point of entry into the corporate net. You can have a country
  that has a single point of entry into its "country net." It's doable. All
  you need, though, is one breach of security, and there's a leak.

  A fire wall is a filter -- it filters and doesn't let certain people come in.
  You can only come in if you have the right permission. So you could
  easily set that up so that it would filter out your objectionable
  material.

this is a temp .sig

> [ Jim Clark, "Firewall China" ]
>
>   A: A lot of people think that's not possible. It's difficult to enforce,
>   but it's certainly possible. A corporation has a so-called fire wall -- a
>   single point of entry into the corporate net. You can have a country
>   that has a single point of entry into its "country net." It's doable. All
>   you need, though, is one breach of security, and there's a leak.
> 
>   A fire wall is a filter -- it filters and doesn't let certain people come in.
>   You can only come in if you have the right permission. So you could
>   easily set that up so that it would filter out your objectionable
>   material.

He seems to be confusing network security with the propagation of content.
A firewall is going to have a lot more trouble filtering dangerous
thoughts than UDP port 1234, unless there are humans in the loop.

Peter Monta   pmonta@qualcomm.com
Qualcomm, Inc./Globalstar