One day, as I surfed the web on my laptop and lamented how long it takes a YouTube video to load, I found myself wondering if employees of the US government are also beholden to the same congestion and shoddy peering that affects everyone else on the internet. Surely, as hundreds of scientists at Fermi Lab near Chicago wait for petabytes of raw data to arrive from the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, they don't suffer interminable connection drops and inexplicable lag. And, as it turns out, they don't.