How does the government know when the public telephone network is down? They call AT&T. How does the government know when the Internet is down? They pay contractors lots of money to put colored maps on the wall. http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2002/0923/web-ncs-09-26-02.asp In other words, much the same thing several thousand ISP NOCs do all the time with their own systems. Some ISPs also provider their customers with outage notification through e-mail, web sites and fax. The big difference is having someone with the expertise and background to analyze the data, to tell the difference between "normal" Internet problems and "real" Internet problems. Things turn "red" on the Internet all the time, it was designed that way. Unfortunately, this seems to be the government version of Netmedic or Zonealarm. Too many false-alarms and lack of useful information for network operators. Why do ISPs want to provide free consulting advice to debug why a government map turned red today? If it is like Zonealarm or Netmedic, most of the "alarms" are due to problems with the customer's application. If the government is interested in Internet outages, why not just subscribe to ISP outage lists and hear the story direct from the source. Or buy a 56K to T1 connection to many different ISPs in various parts of the country. ISPs don't like debugging non-customer problems, but they will at least glance at customer reported problems. Personal opinion only.