One of the wonderful things about the internet is immediate access to experts in any field or any location. It’s an intangible, but anybody in business knows how helpful this is. The government has no such infrastructure on the web – most of their web sites have no emails, and therefore no access. The business of the government would be greatly facilitated if they had such access to other federal agencies, and to their counterparts at the state and sometimes the local level. The government needs its own private web – why not use the Iridium constellation of satellites for this purpose? This would also make it a lot easier to maintain secure communications between the national labs and their counterparts in academia. No more hand signals to transmit national secrets; no more don’t ask don’t tell security checks. One click of the mouse, and it’s gone.