On 7 Aug 2001, at 7:38, Declan McCullagh wrote:

Also, users won't immediately know about the new remailers or have any idea of their reliability. And while the Feds may be generally sluggish, when it comes to law enforcement (that is, remailer raids on anti-terrorism pretexts), I suspect they can be quite efficient.

...

Provided they do not stop off at the donut shop. Some of the recent FBI scandals were callous indifference to human life and disregard of justice, but many of them were carelessness, neglect of duty, and gross incompetence.

No doubt, but I think it's dangerous and entirely to your disadvantage to dismiss everyone doing government work in computer security as a donut- chomping incompetent Barney-Fife-clone imbecile. Anyone can laugh at the department heads on C-SPAN, but did you ever stop to think about who's really doing the hardcore research for the NSA at Ft. Meade--and elsewhere? And did you ever think that they may have decided it's in their best interest to let otherwise informed and intelligent people like you laugh them off as third-rate and underfunded? Think about it.

Similarly consider the CIA, whose assessments of the Soviet Union were consistently less accurate than my own.

Not everyone who wrote assessments for CIA got them past the politicized review of deputy director Gates. As you may know, the whole culture in the 80s was characterized by a deep rift between two warring factions who literally referred to each other as "knuckledraggers" and "commie symps." If the symps had the upper hand instead of the knuckledraggers under Casey, there's not a doubt in my mind you would have seen an entirely different kind of intelligence product. The same old resentments are still there: just yesterday I heard Michael Pillsbury, a former defense policy planner in the Reagan administration, repeatedly refer to analysts who disagreed with him as "panda huggers" during the course of his testimony before the Senate. The hardliners he called "blue team". (Gee, I wonder which side he was on!) I guess "panda huggers" is a little better than "commie symps" but it sure says a lot about the intellectual climate. It won't come as a surprise when we start seeing the same kind of analytic mistakes again because of it...

It appears to me that the level of corruption, laziness, irresponsibility, and sheer incompetence is fairly uniform throughout all branches of the government and all its activities.

I'm sure the senior scientists at Ft. Meade couldn't be more delighted to hear you say that. ~Faustine.