Hi Randy:
the nas is giving it a go, calling for participation in one of their classic committees. not being a great fan of engineering by committee, i hit delete.
You've confused committees. The National Academy committee is studying how the Internet dealt with 9/11. The idea is to take a real-life example (probably our first) of a disaster where the Internet was both (a) infrastructure and (b) a [minor] victim of the disaster. There's been lots of theorizing about how the Internet would behave, and a number of postmortems (mostly from perspectives that could be accused of bias) about how the Internet did on 9/11. To be clear, the committee is not doing engineering and is seeking the widest possible input -- especially as the NAS specializes in producing reports that see to reflect all perspectives. Thus the committee is not out to solve Sean's posed question (though if someone had an answer to Sean's question, it would be useful grist to the committee). Thanks! Craig Partridge (who may end up chairing said committee, pending NAS review for bias issues)