Re: [cryptography] regarding the NSA crypto "breakthrough"
More words from a non-techie: David Kahn, James Bamford, Seymour Hersh and quite a few NSA and other spy types, in particular heads of agencies, Congress, POTUS. SCOTUS, DoJ, are word people. So try as they might to match a word account to the coders and mathematicians, it's pretty well impossible. And the reverse is true from the techies to the wordies. Not many hard core cryptographers are persuasive wordies, so the wordies often run the public show, in the same way the hard cores runs the labs and hacker blow-outs with wearable computers and fuzzy PowerPoints of what a literate person would see as alphanumeric wallpaper. Keep in mind that even many of the reputable tech reporters are not all that techie but are adept at using words lifted from tech drunken orgies. Same in my field of archtecture: the highly literate architectural critics know squat of the down and dirty but excell at reaching the public with artfully simulated accounts burnishing reputations of marketable greatness. In the case of NSA, be damn sure that all its heads knew or know squat about NSA deep tech so they are suited to move the product in blissful ignorance to customers of similar know-not. Michael Hayden and Keith Alexander are perfect for using vapid words to persuade non-techies as little truth as possible is just fine. Back to the latest failure to reveal technical docs. Those who know what's important about them are not likely to tell journalists that, may be incapable of doing so in a way that journalists can apply their vaunted skepticism of sources -- using word skills of truthiness. So what is transferred are narratives, stories, rhetoric, bombast, in lieu of technical specs, math, algorithms, fabrication drawings, chemical and electrical formulations, doses of EM and anti-EM just precisely zapped to the nano-fullerine /->^256/1029: the myrrh and honey of technies, sleep-eeze to the wordies who yawn is that a go or no go to slick brochure printing. "Breakthrough" is PR, which might suggest quotation marks around all the NSA revelations -- so far. A long shot that technical docs will be leaked inadvertently, maybe left as digital debris inside one of the PowerPoint files put on a reused thumb drive and recoverable in a filthy techie lab. I think Ross Anderson could siphon and decipher that compromising junk in a flash. Ross is pretty good at no-nonsense English too.
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John Young