Is the NSA really competent?

[Patrick Juola]

  Here are the biggest breakthroughs in cryptography during the period
  when the NSA has been the purported leader in the field, and 
  has enjoyed by far the largest budget:
  
  [ list of major breakthroughs deleted. ]
  
  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.
  

My understanding is that we don't *know* what NSA actually has found.
For example, *someone* knew about differential cryptanalysis long before
Adi Shamir rediscovered it, as the DES S-boxes are optimized against it.
Similarly, they may have discovered public-key encryption fifty years
ago and simply not bothered to patent/publish it....

	- Patrick

p.s.  Any other cypherpunks heading to ACL this week?  If so, look
me up (Patrick Juola, U. of Colorado) and we can go grab a brew or
something and discuss the state of the world.... pmj