I think that this message betrays a serious misconception that a number of people likely share, and that has to do with the levels of security offered by commercial versus military methods.

I think that this reply betrays a serious lack of reading competence. The breakthroughs cited were the most important breakthroughs in the science of cryptography, period. There are no branches of mathematics called "military" and "commercial". The techniques have both military and commercial application. There is no evidence that the NSA knows about _any_ fundamental technique that has not been published in the literature. Nor is there any evidence (save the hearsay about S-boxes, which were actually developed at IBM) that they have made any major contribution to the science of cryptography, despite the massive resources they throw into it. But they do want to preserve their jobs, so they would like you to think they do. Their ability to drop hints here and there without having to demonstrate they actually know anything, to make people believe that Skipjack is an "advanced" algorithm without having to actually publish it, in general their ability to use their top secret status for the purpose of selective revelation, is perfectly suited to this kind of PR. Thus they can claim to "contribute to American competitiveness" by releasing Skipjack, an algorithm for which there is _not even any evidence that it is stronger than DES_, much less state of the art algorithms like IDEA. This has the actual efffect of shooting the American computer security industry in the balls, while making Congress believe they are helping it. Note that I am _not_ accusing the NSA of political incompetence. Any organization that can get a Congressional intelligence committee to vote its way 13-0, that can keep pushing a warmed-over DES crippled with a last-minute Rube Goldberg version of key escrow, in the face of 70% public opposition (and nearly unanimous and quite vocal opposition in the hi-tech industries) is no political slouch. Any organization that can increase their budget after their mission has gone away, knows the ropes in D.C. They are simply much better lobbyists than cryptographers.

integration style 'one shot' systems for military use created a number of companies, such as the Honeywell Secure Computing Technology Center, as well as a number of DARPA funded groups such as Cray and Thinking Machines.

Of course with their budget, they can buy lots of slick hardware. That doesn't mean they know how to use it well. Let's face it, our awe of NSA stems entirely from their budget and their ability to stamps their incompetence top secret.