trust and information in the clear as it crosses the Internet.

    Trust
    Human beings are trusting by nature. We trust much of what we hear on the radio, see on television, and read in the newspaper. We trust the labels on packages. We trust the mail we receive. We trust our parents, our partner or spouse, and our children. We trust our co-workers. In fact, those who don’t trust much are thought to be cynical. Their opinions may be all too quickly ignored or dismissed.

    The Internet was built on trust.1 Back in the mid 1960s, computers were very expensive and slow by today’s standards, but still quite useful. To share the expensive and scarce computers installed around the country, the U.S. government funded a research project to connect these computers together so that other researchers could use them remotely. This project was called the ARPAnet, named after the government research agency – ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency – that funded and managed the project.

    Key to the ARPAnet was the level of trust placed in its users; there was little thought given to malicious activity. Computers communicated using a straightforward scheme that relied on everybody playing by the rules. The idea was to make sharing ideas and resources easy and as efficient as the technology of the day provided. This philosophy of trust colors many of the practices, procedures, and technologies that are still in place today.

  &nbs