Tsutomu says the NSA is inept rather than inherently evil. I think he concluded this because they declined to fund his work. An ept and evil NSA would want Tsutomu on the payroll. Tsutomu's stealth version of the Berkeley packet filter did a lot more than modload into the kernel. He was paid by the Air Force to design one that could patch itself into SunOS kernels invisibly, even into kernels with no modload support at all. It had special code that would search through the kernel binary for references to the address of the Ethernet chip, and patch itself in during the very low level interrupt handling. It was highly optimized so it wouldn't show up by loading down the machine, and it did things like decrement the interrupt counter so that even the extra interrupts caused by running the Ethernet chip in 'receive every packet on the wire' mode wouldn't be visible. He talked about enhancements that would automatically forward packets of interest back out onto the Internet, so the whole shebang would hide in kernel memory, never visible to users, never running any processes or altering any files. Think of it as Digital Telephony wiretap technology for the Internet. The idea was to design something that you could run on a machine without the owner ever finding out about it. To break into that person's network. It's a tool customized for crackers. It's one of the tools that Mitnick was after when he broke into Tsutomu's machine. Tsutomu actually wrote and ran this stealth BPF code (as well as designing it) and got into a tiff with the Air Force. They wanted the code, not just the design paper they'd commissioned. He countered by offering to post the code to the net, with a copyright that let anyone EXCEPT the government use it, if they wouldn't pay him for the paper. I don't know how the situation was eventually resolved. Tsutomu has lots of glib rhetoric about how he just builds tools and they can be used for good or evil. This tool is custom-designed for evil. Maybe in wartime the Air Force will want to inflict evil on an opponent. Or maybe instead they'll pass it to a latter-day J. Edgar Hoover. Either way, it's evil. It doesn't become good when you inflict it on someone you dislike. -- John Gilmore gnu@toad.com -- gnu@eff.org Don't introduce that Tsutomu to your girlfriend.