agentx@fbi.govFollow

I should send them an invite to GMail.

Everything is OK.


America must support its troops, we must not blame people for repeated monumental failures in leadership and judgement. We must focus on those who would attack America, not attack each other. Questioning leaders in time of war is unpatriotic. Why do you hate America?

God Bless our Great Nation.

:O I challenge you to A dUEL!!!!!! and by that I mean drinking contest, guns are to hard to get in my country

UDS/Deadwood/Abbay dat choo?

To be honest, it's not as ridiculous as it sounds. They have internal email, just not internet accessable .gov addresses. And there's certainly nothing keeping them from obtaining and maintaining their own addresses as well. I'm betting a lot of the problem isn't a budget decrease, but a cost increase. Post 9/11 means a lot more security on any .gov site. That includes email servers. Anyone who's worked in a classified site knows how incredibly obnoxiously strict operating at a government "secure" level is. There's a heck of a lot of work involved in getting folks working at a secure site to be able to recieve email from "outside", without potentially compromising that security.


And anyone who's worked in IT in general for the last 5 years knows that there have been a number of new laws and requirements (not really laws so much as stuff you have to meet to get certain "grades" for security). And I can tell you right off that many of them are totally ridiculous (and some counter to their own purposes). It doesn't surprise me at all that some sites might simply choose not to deal with handling external internet traffic at all...

Well, for the FBI, it's a little more complicated. They have to secure everything a hell of alot more than the rest of us government agencies, so their costs are at least triple the average IT budget per user for a federal government user, and those budgets are not small to begin with.

That is freaking ridiculous. E-mail is hardly a costly investment, what the hell kinda retards does the government have working for them in IT? This story alone is enough to make me want to evade taxes for the rest of my life.

Are you an expert on network security? Have you ever been involved in actually securing an internet connected site other then your home computer?

90% of home security is what's called "security through obscurity". You don't need to put anything more then a simple firewall up, becuase no one's actually targetting you. You're at worse someone who might get dinged via a random port scan on a subnet somewhere.

Government and corporate sites are targets. People choose to hack .gov sites. They choose to hack large corporate sites. They do this, not for fun, but because those sites contain data that's useful and valuable. And the quality of the hacker is far beyond the script kiddie that might, if you're unlucky, send a virus your way. It is *very* expensive to secure those sites. And guess what? Email is one of the hardest things to secure. I can have the most secure multi-layered firewall system in the world, but if there's a hack embedded inside a compressed file in an email that gets sent inside that firewall and uncompressed and run, none of that helped. And the guys targetting .gov sites aren't using stuff that's already included in your basic virus scanner. Security that works for the home does *not* work at larger sites.

Brazillion employees cost more than Mexican ones. Don't you know anything about economics?