Agreed. It is fascinating to me, having been on the other side of the "it would cost too much to re-implement" discussion when I was at Sun and NetApp and talking to some large enterprise type customers, the flip question is "What does it cost for the current implementation to fail?"

Few people have direct experience with that, remember that many of these systems are essentially the "second" generation of automation that has gone on in government. Systems built in the 90's were not even imagining the kinds of drive by side-load sandbox hopping attacks that are routine today. I expect it to get worse before it gets better but the new Digital Service has some interesting ideas there. I fear such things will lead to nationalizing the Internet as well and that bothers me, I still believe (perhaps naively) that it is possible to secure large networks from even persistent threats given the tools at our disposal.