On Friday, August 31, 2001, at 11:43 AM, Faustine wrote:

Tim wrote:

...

But, as with Kirchoff's point, the attacker is going to get the design eventually. If getting the design "eventually" were good enough, why the keen interest in putting in a large order for the beta? There's a reason.

Perhaps the NSA wanted to use the product without making illegal copies?

Your earlier point (that they wished to reverse-engineer the product) is in fact undermined by this fact that they bought N copies.

Unless you believe reverse engineering is only useful for making pirated copies, there's no reason to assume any sort of contradiction at all. As if the NSA would use anything from the private sector they didn't know inside out. ~Faustine.