[LINK] Brian Denehy

[Tom Worthington]

At 12:28 PM 7/07/2007, Antony Barry wrote:
>... Sadly Brian Denehy has died.  ... As a member of CAUDIT he was 
>instrumental in the early history of
>AARNet. ...

In addition to his AARnet work, Brian had an important role in 
getting the Department of Defence and the Federal Government onto the 
Internet and the web. He showed us how the work being pioneered 
AARnet could be applied to the government and then helped set up 
those services across government.

Brian provided me with an "oz.au" email account in 1994 on the ADFA 
computer system, when I worked for the Commonwealth Ombudsman's 
Office (which as also the Defence Force Ombudsman). Like many in the 
bureaucracy, it only slowly dawned on me what the Internet was, that 
I was now part of it and it could be used for government.

In March 1995 I arranged with Brian for ADFA to host the Defence 
Department's web site 
<http://groups.google.com.au/group/comp.infosystems.www.announce/msg/83e696ebe56bd189?dmode=source&hl=en>. 
I was then able to use this precedent to encourage other government 
departments to use the web.

In May 1995 ADFA provided a security accredited connection to the 
Defence system 
<http://groups.google.com.au/group/canb.general/msg/e14d61f4d0a61bbe?hl=en&>. 
This helped convince other government agencies that the Internet was 
not an unacceptable security risk.

Brian was closely involved in setting up the Federal Government 
shared Secure Gateway Environment which provided secure Internet 
connections between agencies and was later privatized 
<http://www.mail-archive.com/cypherpunks@minder.net/msg30043.html>.

Brian was the guest of honor at the Internet Reality Check Drinks in 
January 1997: <http://www.tomw.net.au/irc/irc9.html>.

By providing network services to the Government which actually 
worked, Brian was able to counter the usual "lets form a committee" 
bureaucratic inertia.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                http://www.tomw.net.au/
Visiting Fellow, ANU      Blog: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/atom.xml