[Here I quote nobody@soda who quotes remail@tamsun:]
*Excuse me, but I'm getting tired of this silly paranoia. NSA *is not Evil Incarnate Central, and we are not fighting a Valiant War ==
We? WE! Do you suppose that was a Freudian slip, or did he mean to say it like that? Whoever he is, he works for the NSA. Did anyone else notice this at the time?
Nobody, when I read the original post I assumed the "we" you're talking about was 'we, the Cypherpunks.' I.e., if NSA were truly Evil Incarnate Central, the Cypherpunks would be fighting "a Valiant War ["We Are Fated to Lose"]". For a moment there, nobody, you nearly had me believing you. But read the rest of the post, and the above 'slip' becomes much less interesting: [Me quoting nobody@soda quoting remail@tamsun, again:]
*We Are Fated to Lose. The NSA are a bunch of Americans who went *to school & college with the rest of us, and share our communities *with us. Most of them joined NSA to fight totalitarian Communism, and *most of them are sympathetic with values most Americans share when they *bother to think about them, like freedom, privacy, etc. Sure, NSA has *been caught up in the Cold War habits of secrecy, bureaucracy, and *an ingrained habit to control information. It's also almost surely *caught up in the same kind of bureaucratic incompetence we see ^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^ The NSA is caught up in bureaucracy, so the Cypherpunks need not lose.
*in the rest of the U.S. Federal government (most of the DoD, the space *programs, the BATF, the FBI, etc.) Does a $40+ crypto-voice-chip with *an obvious trap door look like Malicious Plot to Destroy All Strong *Crypto and Take Over The World, or does it look like an *a half-competent, half-hearted attempt to retain Cold War era ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Cypherpunks are not fated to lose, because the NSA's attempts are fated to fail.
*capabilities they had gotten used to?
[rest deleted] If you give me some time, I can contact the author of the original post -- remail@tamsun.tamu.edu -- and have him post a confirmation of my interpretation of his original post. /* for (i=0 ; i<2**64 ; i++) printf(":>"); */ Liam Gray - lg2g+@andrew.cmu.edu