Alex Strasheim writes:
If this is true, it's great news. It would mean that the NSA is adopting both cypherpunk analysis and tactics. Who would have thought? An NSA remade in Tim May's image.
I suspect that the NSA was thinking in our terms long before many of us were aware of cryptography. I actually think that in many cases, their behavior is perfectly rational. Their goals are merely different. If you are in SIGINT, I believe that the possibility of totally losing a valued intelligence tool must heavily weigh on your mind. Of course, they are hardly monolithic, and different groups at the NSA necessarily have different goals. Once SIGINT becomes much harder regardless of their previous attempts to stop it, I suspect that the NSA will become a friend and not an impediment. By that time, of course, the "we have to protect our people" types will be the only ones producing results and getting funding, and the "we have to gather information" types will have long ceased to produce. Thats probably a decade or more off, though. Perry