Is the NSA really competent?

[Greg Broiles]

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An anonymous author writes:

> For all their vaunted competence, for all the mathematicians
> they have been alleged to employ, despite having a cryptography
> budget orders of magnitude larger than any other Western
> crypto group, it looks like the NSA contribued to _none_ of 
> the major advances in cryptography that occured during its zenith.

The above assumes that if the NSA does something interesting they'll
tell the world about it. I'm not sure that's a plausible assumption.
They seem to view their mission as creating and maintaining a
balance-of-power of intelligence in favor of the United States;
specifically, gathering intelligence, preserving their ability to
gather intelligence, and preventing others from gathering intelligence.
Revealing the existence or substance of crypto breakthroughs isn't
necessarily compatible with that mission, at least as it's been
historically understood.

(I think remailers are good, but their use makes it necessary to
write to the list to reply; I'd have preferred to reply in E-mail.)


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