SECURING THE WEB: Making the Internet a better (and safer) place to live means mapping many of the institutions of the real world--defense, taxation, government, law enforcement--over to cyberspace. Here are some of the things that must to happen to bring the Internet into line.

I am in the odd position today of actually rooting--at least a little--for the Code Red worm. As I write this, late Wednesday afternoon, I am also getting ready to shut down one of my servers, which I don't think is infected...but I don't want to take a chance. And by the time you read this, we should have some idea how much damage, if any, the worm did. Maybe this will be Y2K all over again.

If you're reading this column at the usual time you do such things, then the worm probably wasn't too bad, at least where you live. But if getting to the column has been an uphill slog (thanks for the effort!), then the worm has met with great success. I am hoping for the former, but since the latter is someday inevitable I'd just as soon get it over with.

I DON'T KNOW WHAT IT WILL TAKE for people to understand the seriousness of Internet threats, except for them to experience the downside themselves. Perhaps when a worm takes down the Net for a few hours people will get the hint that something needs to be done. Then the authors of these software bombs will stop being treated as cuddly, iconoclastic hackers and treated like the criminals and sociopaths they are.

If our homes were as much under siege as our computers are, we'd have troops in the streets and martial law. While the Internet hasn't come to that, I won't be surprised when it does. We can head that drastic an action off--but only if we're ready to make some changes.

• We need strong privacy protection, but no expectation of anonymity. Data you send should always be traceable to a particular computer and/or person. Removing anonymity would improve Internet behavior immeasurably and immediately. Think of this as not answering the phone when the Caller ID doesn't display.
• We need a system of national routers and firewalls capable of, in the worst case, sealing our cyberfrontier in the event of cyberattack. This is the Internet equivalent of the much-discussed missile defense system with one difference: This would actually work.
• These firewalls might be set to block anything they don't recognise--unapproved encryption schemes, business transactions without tax information attached, emails without a valid signature, whatever. Want to stop illegal Internet gambling? The firewall could, for example, block both access to the sites and their credit-card transactions.
• We need national borders on the Internet, perhaps with a "most trusted nation" status for countries that share our data and network protection policies and a "rogue state" designation for countries whose networks would be quarantined from the rest of the world.
• Internet-based economic sanctions--an e-commerce embargo--would be used to bring nations into line, mirroring events in the physical world.
• An Internet "border patrol" or "coast guard" would protect us from external threats, while an Internet unit of the FBI would assist state and local law enforcement in solving criminal cases.
• Every region--and soon every major city--would have a computer crime lab comparable in size and function to their physical evidence collection and evaluation units.
• The Internet Customs Bureau would exist to ensure that proper taxation and trade policies are followed. Not attaching the proper financial information to certain transactions would be a crime of tax evasion.

If all this sounds like I am creating a cyber police state, well, that's what I thought you (well, some of you) would think. But what I am actually describing are well-known features of the physical world--defense, taxation, law enforcement--applied to the Internet. And as the Internet becomes more and more the fabric of our business and personal lives, I feel quite certain many of these things will come to pass.

For the Internet to become civilised, it will need to become a real civil society in which rules matter and violators are punished.

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