[ih] DCA, the NIC, and the Gulf War

[Eric Gade]

In the course of my research on the NIC in the 1980s, I've come across and
interesting incident. It seems that on December 7th 1990, DCA sent an email
to the NIC instructing them to "roll-back" database changes that had been
made in the process of implementing RFC 1174. Their argument was that such
changes hadn't been payed for. This seems to have incited a good amount of
anger on the NIC side of things, and the response was the rather timely
example that reverting to pre-RFC 1174 would remove important
*military*hosts from the DNS which would have drastic effects on
Operation Desert
Shield.

This is all the more interesting because a month prior to this exchange, the
NIC had removed KW from the host table at the behest of it's esponsible
authority, which at that time was CSNET. IAB members were asked specifically
whether this removal was inspired by the contemporary political situation
(ie, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait). Their response was that the NIC had
indeed followed the correct procedure in obeying CSNET's request precisely
because that organization was the Administrative and Technical Contact. Such
an overtly political response, in my mind, dodged the question. Or perhaps
the question itself was incorrect. I suppose it should have been: why did
CSNET make this request?

I would like to see if anyone can comment further on either of these events,
especially those that may have been involved at the time.

-- 
Eric G
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