On July 2, Salon published an interview with John Gilmore, a software entrepreneur and longtime Internet visionary, that called for the outright abolition of ICANN. Gilmore is also helping to fund a lawsuit by Karl Auerbach, a popularly elected ICANN board member, that is demanding access to ICANN's financial books.

In response to the Gilmore interview, Salon received an angry letter from ICANN's chief counsel, Joe Sims, and was also approached by Esther Dyson, who sought an opportunity to explain some of the "nuances" of ICANN's operations.

Salon: John Gilmore says we should have thousands of top-level domains.

Dyson: If people are redesigning the system from the start you'd probably do it entirely differently. But why could God build the world in only seven days, you know? Because he had no legacy systems.

In the long run you could create thousands of top level domain names, but you'd end up with the same issues. As long as you have names you're going to have scarcity, and artificial scarcity. ICANN should create a whole lot more top level domains and take the artificial scarcity out of the market.

The leader of the Transportation Security Administration, which was established last winter to protect travelers after September 11, was forced out of his job today as questions intensified about whether the agency had moved quickly enough to improve airport security.

The surprise firing of John Magaw, who was under secretary of transportation for security, is the latest indication that his agency has not made enough progress in the huge job of tightening security at the nation's 429 commercial airports.

The dismissal underscores the administration's struggle to achieve its domestic security goals.

"He was eased out. There was a lot of back-room talk about his management style, or lack thereof, ... tending to gold-plate everything."

The Bush administration's broad new proposal for domestic security, to be made public on Tuesday, calls for sweeping changes that include the creation of a top-secret plan to protect the nation's critical infrastructure and a review of the law that could allow the military to operate more aggressively within the United States.

Among the proposals: Create an "intelligence threat division" in the new department that uses what the plan calls "red teams" of intelligence experts. These teams would act like terrorists and plot attacks on vulnerable new targets in the country so that means of preventing such attacks can be devised.

The plan calls for the first thorough inventory of the country's critical infrastructure — both public and private — followed by a secret plan to protect it. The inventory would include, for example, highways, pipelines, agriculture, the Internet, databases and energy plants.

A new report from a team of homeland security experts at the Brookings Institution recommends that Congress modify key elements of President Bush's proposal.

The report concludes that the Bush proposal "merges too many different activities into a single department, including many that have little day-to-day connection with one another." The authors recommend that Congress include in the new department only border, transportation, and infrastructure security agencies, plus a major new intelligence assessment and analysis unit.

The government will hold suspected American terrorist Jose Padilla indefinitely and will not bring him before a military tribunal, according to congressional and US officials.

Justice officials made their case in a closed meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee, arguing the United States has the legal power to hold Padilla until President Bush decides the war against terrorism is over.

While the dividing line between liberalism and libertarianism is not always straightforward, libertarianism is a far more radical dogma whose limitations are becoming increasingly clear. The libertarian wing of the revolution overreached itself, and is now fighting rearguard actions on two fronts: foreign policy and biotechnology.

[After the Gulf War,] libertarians saw no larger meaning in America's global role, no reason to promote democracy and freedom abroad. Sept. 11 ended this line of argument.

The second area in which libertarians have overreached themselves is in biotechnology. ... there are reasons to be skeptical of arguments that say that genetic engineering is just another choice.

... Do we really know what it means to improve a child?