Mike, Sorry about the delay in answering your question. For some reason
this site wouldn't let me reply last week. The government entity is the
Defense Security Service (DSS) and apparently chapter 8 of the latest
Information Systems security guide stipulates a password of at least 8
characters with upper and lower case, numbers and special characters. This
is probably a more important deal for Windows and Unix (Linux too maybe)
systems but the government lumps the IBM in with all other platforms,
probably because they don't run into them as much in the defense industry.
Karl Severson
Raytheon Company
