There is some recent discussion of some sort of "multilevel" internet, with e.g. a level defined for banking in which access is only granted after special authentication with "true names", special credentials, and an explicit consent to permit packet searches:
Former CIA Director: Build a new Internet to improve cybersecurity - Nextgov
"The most important value of a dot-secure domain is that, like dot-gov and dot-mil, now we can satisfy consent under the Fourth Amendment search requirements for the government's defenses to do their work within that domain, their work of screening for attack signals, botnets and viruses."
searches of the .gov domain are conducted by the Einstein program, an intrusion prevention and detection system under the direction of the Homeland Security Department that monitors only federal traffic for signs of unauthorized access.
Has anyone seen any technical proposals for how to design something along those lines which might actually result in improved security? Or is this just bad reporting or clueless bureaucrats speaking?
This is sometimes associated with a ".secure" top-level domain, but without a lot of other mechanisms that of course wouldn't do anything to help security.
And assuming that the websites in this .secure level of the Internet all use SSL all the time, what good would it do for the government to have legal permission to search packets?
Alternatively I guess I could imagine some sort of big semi-public VPN to which access is controlled - has that been explored? But finding mechanisms that are resistant to phishing or DDoS still seem pretty hard.
