Vin wrote:
It will be interesting to see how explicit it is, and what sort of demand for an overt stamp of approval from the NSA still exists in the marketplace.
NIST has stated that the maximum endorsement will be to use AES for non-classified government information. So the question will remain of what is better than AES, or to put it another way, what is not good enough about AES for its use on classified information. To be sure it would be too much to expect that the USG would promote a program that it could not penetrate, or to put it another way, to openly disclose a technology it believes to provide maximum data protection. If NSA/NIST went that far the agencies would be shut by DC for national security reasons. Still, one can dream of NIST/NSA slipping through a technology stronger than the ordinary officeholding paranoid, secrecy-loving power mongering goofus can prevent by way of elastic oversight technology. David Alvarez writes of the intel agencies withholding most secret information from the president in the 30s and 40s on the belief that that office could not be trusted to put the nation's interest above its own urgencies to endure. What a wonder it would be to read in say, 25 years, that NIST/NSA raced a fast one past their watchers and advanced the public's interest over the government's. Lots of those folks are looking forward to becoming well-paid ex-govs, having seen what lucrative benefits have come the way of those who jumped ship. Is it conceivable that the USG's need for maximum protection of its information would take second place to the need of the public's protection from government? That depends on what government workers -- especially the defense establishment defined by Eisenhower -- believe their future to be. The burgeoning market for dual use technologies is surely going to change the way globalism gets implemented, now that so many of those who fostered those technologies are coming into the marketplace as hungry players, not merely underwriters and regulators. This applies not only to the the former Soviet Union and the US best minds who are fed up with their bosses' maximum perk protection. Davidge's expose of Tennant is instructive of how the unders apply payback to the uppers who cannot believe NDA's and third-class pensions no longer control intellects once with no where else to thrive than as national servants.