When did the Internet become CENTRAL to national security???? Mildly important? Sure. Central? No way! I think Senator Burns is mistaking national security for political security therefore he must DO SOMETHING about the problems at ICANN.
I suppose it depends on what you define as national security. The smooth running of government is important to national security and you will find that in nearly every facet of government the Internet has started to play a major part, atleast for email, but much more in some cases. The problem with this is that most of these changes haven't been as well co-ordinated as they might have been, so when there is no Internet figure out the processes to get basic things done doesn't exist. The deployment of email for many organisations has been unplanned i.e. it was switched on one day. The backup systems/processes for when its down don't exist anymore or aren't kept uptodate. Even international inter-government issues are dealt with over the Internet now. So in my view the Internet is important to national and probably global security. Which I think everyone on this list should be somewhat happy about. Regards, Neil.