Security and Privacy in the NII

Abstract : The National Information Infrastructure (NII) is a vast undertaking to provide a web of networks, computers and databases to communication and information throughout the country. One of the more difficult topics is privacy and security on the NII. These are areas that are crucial to making the NII fully useful for government and for commerce. The JASON study examined technical issues of security and privacy and came to the conclusion that the problems are policy and not technical in nature. That is, the technology exists to provide security and privacy services on the NII but that issues of what services and their implementation must be resolved. The report suggests some steps that ARPA can make to help resolve the policy issues.