-- Faustine:
I think it's dangerous and entirely to your disadvantage to dismiss everyone doing government work in computer security as a donut- chomping incompetent Barney-Fife-clone imbecile.
Anyone can laugh at the department heads on C-SPAN, but did you ever stop to think about who's really doing the hardcore research for the NSA at Ft. Meade--and elsewhere?
To judge by their most recent crypto ballsup, some donut chomping incompetents.
And did you ever think that they may have decided it's in their best interest to let otherwise informed and intelligent people like you laugh them off as third-rate and underfunded?
I would never imagine a government department to be underfunded. James A. Donald:
Similarly consider the CIA, whose assessments of the Soviet Union were consistently less accurate than my own.
Not everyone who wrote assessments for CIA got them past the politicized review of deputy director Gates. As you may know, the whole culture in the 80s was characterized by a deep rift between two warring factions who literally referred to each other as "knuckledraggers" and "commie symps." If the symps had the upper hand instead of the knuckledraggers under Casey, there's not a doubt in my mind you would have seen an entirely different kind of intelligence product.
The commie symps favored the "alliance for progress", which shows they were even further out of contact with reality than the knuckledraggers. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG pwsZCPD6q7113H400Rs9K5JCzrrsWPOl6bI7Tvnp 4E235p2QsARNd3MJytLRqPWA6e1tPeFgkVTDyQmUW