"Remember that the spookfabs don't have to contend with *economics and yield*." Damn, this is precisely where I wish Tim May was still around. Certainly, the Spooks have their own fabs, and I don't think they even hide this fact (I doubt they could, ultimately). And certainly, the Spooks crank out all sort of special ASICs using their own IP as well as some store-bought stuff they drop onto their designs. However, where I have some BIG doubts is whether their fab is X generations ahead of the most advanced commercial fabs. Frankly, I bet they have a pretty good fab that was modified by a commercial vendor to support small production runs. This fab, however, does not utilize cosmic rays for etching or whatever. It's probably 0.13 microns at best (wait...I think Taiwan Semi and a couple of other places are one step ahead of this). This limits what they can do with a chip or chipset, and implies that they won't be orders of magnitude better at opening up LOTS of traffic. (In non-troll mode.) -TD

From: "Major Variola (ret)" To: "cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net" Subject: Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2004 21:34:59 -0700

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Variola wrote...

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In the *public* lit.

Well, perhaps but perhaps not. Burst-mode signaling, transceivers, and networking technology are a good example. If you see DISA, NSA, and DARPA all working with the acknoledged experts inthe academic field, and if you see them spending $$$ on burst-mode testbeds, then it's clear that

At 03:52 PM 7/27/04 -0400, Tyler Durden wrote: there are

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some issues they haven't solved.

You're right on this, I admit. Its clear that things like smart dust and gait recognition and autonomous cruising across the desert are not things the Beast has yet.

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There just happen to be physical limitations. But I have zero doubt that the NSA can't make a laser that is siginificantly more efficient than what I can buy off the shelf.

I'm not one to dispute physics. However most professional skeptics (eg cryptographers) grant the adversary anything from 2 to 10 x the COTS tech. Do you *really* think the NSA's DesCrack was built with old Sun chassis like Gilmore, Kocher, et als???

Remember that the spookfabs don't have to contend with *economics and yield*. They can use *radioisotopes*. Subs can lay independant cable. Not a lot of folks walk along the undersea cables, to say nothing of how bribable telecom folks are.

Conservativism sometimes means being liberal in modelling others' capabilities.

------ Be Useful -the Baron

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