Ernest Hua <hua@xenon.chromatic.com> writes:
It sounds like most of their "counter-arguments" are just stalling tactics.
If you are a lawyer for someone you know is guilty, you still would choose to find every reason in the book to attack the prosecution's case. Here we have precisely the same effect with the NSA. Any tactical manuveur to keep stalling the impending collapse of ITAR.
(It is human .. er .. rather .. bureaucrat-esque to claim innocence in the face of overwhelming evidence of guilt.)
Particularly impressive is that our key length report was hardly above criticism from several angles, but their rebuttal managed somehow to avoid them. What I find most disturbing about this is that their report was provided secretly to policymakers in the administration and in Congress, without independent technical review that would have quickly exposed the fallacy of the arguments. I never would have seen it had several of the recipients not faxed it to me. This is the first hard evidence I've seen of NSA providing anything less than the highest quality technical analysis to other parts of the government. A non-specialist reader would be easily misled by the technically dense, but completely irrelevant, "rebuttal". It smacks of either ill-informed sloppiness, or, perhaps worse, self-serving disingenuous cynicism. Either conclusion is scary, and, to me in fact, quite surprising. -matt