Let’s talk about TIC today, dear readers, for I smell a conspiracy theory brewing.

For those of you who missed the quick brief, TIC is short for “Trusted Internet Connections” and is an architecture model/mandate/$foo to take all of the Internet connections in the Government (srsly, nobody knows how many of them really exist, but it’s somewhere in the 2,000-10,000 range) and consolidate them into 50.  These connections will then be monitored by DHS’s Einstein program.

No, Not That Kind of TIC photo by m.prinke.

Bringing you all up to date, you’ll need to do some homework:

• OMB Memo 08-05, “Implementation of Trusted Internet Connections (TIC)”
• Planning Guidance for Trusted Internet Connections (TIC)
• Final Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) Initiative Statement of Capability Evaluation Report, dated June 4, 2008
• OMB Memo 08-27 Guidance for Trusted Internet Connection (TIC) Compliance

Now having read all of this, some things become fairly obvious:

• If you have the following people needing connections:
  • 24 agencies, plus
  • DoD with 2 points of presence, plus
  • Intelligence agencies with a handful of Internet connections, means that:
• That basically, everybody gets one Internet connection.  This is not good, it’s all single point-of-DOS.
• Agencies have been designated as Internet providers for other agencies.  Sounds like LoB in action.
• Given the amount of traffic going through the TIC access points, it most likely is going to take a significant amount of hardware to monitor all these connections–maybe you saved 50% of the monitoring hardware by reducing the footprint, but it’s still hardware-intensive.
• TIC is closely tied with the Networx contract.
• In order to share Internet connections, there needs to be a network core between all of the agencies so that an agency without a TIC access point can route through multiple TIC service provider agencies.

And this is where my conspiracy theory comes in:  TIC is more about making a grand unified Government network than it is monitoring events–Einstein is just an intermediate goal.   If you think about it, this is where the Government is headed.

We were headed this way back in ought-two with a wonderful name: GovNet.  To be honest, the groundwork wasn’t there and the idea was way ahead of its time and died a horrible death, but it’s gradually starting to happen, thanks to TIC, FDCC, and Einstein. 

More fun links:

• Wired GovNet Article
• FCW GovNet Article
• Gartner Email Analysis on GOVNET (Note this gem: “Enterprises and government agencies should assume that a long-term solution to Internet security will arise elsewhere and should proceed to buy denial-of-service protection and other managed security services from commercial providers.”)

If you want to get a reaction out of the OMB folks, mention GovNet and watch them backpedal and cringe,–I think the pain factor was very high for them on GovNet. So I think that we should, as a cadre of information security folks, start calling TIC what it really is:  Govnet 2.0!  =)

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