At 09:47 AM 08/31/2001 -0700, jamesd@echeque.com wrote:
-- On 30 Aug 2001, at 14:52, Faustine wrote:
And as long as you have companies like ZeroKnowledge who are willing/gullible/greedy/just plain fucking stupid enough to sell their betas to the NSA, you never will.
There is nothing wrong with selling betas to the NSA. I make my crypto source code available to the NSA, and to everyone else. Everyone should do this. Anyone that fails to do that is up to no good.
The difference between Real Open Source and giving copies to the NSA is that Real Open Source users will often send YOU the bug reports instead of just keeping them to themselves :-) But yes, if you're giving away free betas, the NSA can have them too. And if you're doing the "$49 for 5 nyms" deal, they can buy them too, whether they admit that they're doing it or whether you just get orders from the Maryland Procurement Office or a credit card belonging to R.Canine, Columbia MD. The more interesting question is NSA's access to the server software. If they want it badly enough, and don't want to admit it, there's probably some small ISP with In-Q-It funding out there.