"First of all, this 'Research and Education'
aspect. Since communications *is* power in an Information
Society, giving fantastically advanced communications to
the Research and Education communities did in fact empower
those communities quite drastically by comparison with
interest-groups lacking that advantage. Today, one of the
most feared political organizations in the world is the
multi-national anarchist libertarian group called the
Students for an Utterly Free Society.
"Of course, there have always been campus
radicals, but thanks to their relative lack of financial
clout, and lack of even a steady home address, these young
fanatics once found it very difficult to organize
politically. Therefore, they were easy for the powers-
that-be to ignore, except during occasional spasms of
violent campus unrest.
"Thanks to NREN, however, spasms of student
unrest can now spread like lightning across entire
continents. Advanced AI translation programs installed on
the Net only made matters worse, since in 2015 the global
leaders of the student movements are not only extremely
radical, but French.
"Attempts by campus authorities to control this
unrest have failed miserably. In 2015, NREN sites are
always the first buildings occupied during a campus
strike. Campus chancellors and faculty are themselves so
utterly dependent on NREN that they become quite helpless
off-line.
"A second major problem has been the growth of
unlicenced encryption, which has proved quite unstoppable.
Today some seventy-five percent of NREN archives are
material that no one in authority can read. Countries
that attempted to control and monitor network traffic have
lost market share and service revenue as data processing
simply moves offshore.
"The United States has profited by this
phenomenon to a great extent as people worldwide have
flocked to the relative liberty of our networks.
Unfortunately many of these electronic virtual immigrants
are not simply dissidents looking for free expression but
in fact are organized criminals.
"Take for instance a recent FBI raid on an
enormous archive of encrypted Iranian files, illicitly
stored in an obscure NREN node in North Dakota. Luckily
