The most outraged and outrageous comments have come from John Derrick Jr., chairman of Pepco Holdings Inc., a power provider in the Washington, D.C., area. As far as Derrick is concerned, the public has no right to know about infrastructure basics and should relegate knowledge of all such information to the experts. Thankfully, even the founder of the National Infrastructure Protection Center, Michael Vatis, told the Washington Post he realizes that promoting secrecy and obscurity is just an excuse for not providing physical protection for data networks.

Engineers have a natural propensity to want to encourage those in the arts and business administration fields to understand the basics of how things work. Where the nation's utilities infrastructure is concerned, the additional argument can be made that, if citizens do not understand the basics of telecommunication switching systems and electrical power grids, they can be made the easy victim of scams like the En-ron energy-trading scheme.

To me, this whole debate smacks too much of the Department of Energy's recent designation of the category "sensitive but unclassified." The Energy Department's barons of nuclear technology are finding supporters in the Defense and Transportation departments, who figure that even if a particular technology isn't classified, it deserves to be protected from the prying eyes of the public to prevent terrorist attack.

This is precisely how we begin to slide down the slippery slope of greater information classification. Once utility networks are declared sensitive, they can later be targeted for outright classification. Next thing you know, the details of Internet protocols, and even the meetings of the IEEE and Internet Engineering Task Force, might be subject to government regulation.

The time to stop this nonsense is now. If public maps of utility infrastructure identify potential choke points where terrorists could hit, those choke points should be protected. But the government has no business trying to classify the details of communications infrastructure under the guise of protecting the public from gaining too much information.

Loring Wirbel is Communications editorial director for EE Times and its network publications.