Re:So how will they get data in/out ? (Score 4, Interesting)

I can offer an example from the State Department. (None of this should get me jailed, I don't think.) Someone mentioned working at a credit-card processing company where only one computer was connected to the internet, and the rest solely to the LAN? The State Department applied the same principle of redundant hardware, on a much vaster scale. When I worked there in 2000-2001, each desk had two machines hooked up to a single monitor, mouse and keyboard via a switching box. One machine, covered in green stickers, as the "unclass" box; the other, covered in red, was "class." The unclass machine was hooked up to the internet via ethernet; the class machine was hooked up to State's LAN via ethernet, through a separate series of routers and servers. (The class machine also had a removable hard disk, the type that you unlock, yank out, and toss into your safe every night, along with all of your files.) The only way to transfer information between the two machines was via floppy disk.

The principle was good: all of your internet research and private email was done on the unclass machine; all of your quotidian tasks, including accessing the archives and the cable database, was done on the class machine. Department-Embassy communication went through the State Department's cable system and thus was also unconnected from the public network.

If the government is willing to apply hardware redundancy on a massive scale, they can certainly replicate such a system in those agencies that do not have it already. There are still obvious human errors that can muck up such a system. For example, when rushed, many foreign service officers would e-mail colleagues in the embassies for information. While one wasn't supposed to discuss classified topics on e-mail because of the weaker security, it wasn't always easy to decide where to draw the line. Similarly, if you were writing a report that drew on classified and unclassified data, and much of the unclassified data was online, then it was tempting to slap your floppy disk with a copy of your classified report into the unclassified machine and work on it there, so as to copy and paste material more easily. Still, these are human errors; eliminating them is a different topic. As long as we are willing to think on a scale commensurate with the government's resources, it would be technically difficult to create such a system.