Traceable Infrastructure is as vulnerable as traceable messages.

[Faustine]

On 7 Aug 2001, at 7:38, Declan McCullagh wrote:
> Also, users won't immediately know about the new remailers or
> have any idea of their reliability. And while the Feds may be
> generally sluggish, when it comes to law enforcement (that is,
> remailer raids on anti-terrorism pretexts), I suspect they can
> be quite efficient.
>>Provided they do not stop off at the donut shop.
>>Some of the recent FBI scandals were callous indifference to
>>human life and disregard of justice, but many of them were
>>carelessness, neglect of duty, and gross incompetence.


No doubt, but I think it's dangerous and entirely to your disadvantage to 
dismiss everyone doing government work in computer security as a donut-
chomping incompetent Barney-Fife-clone imbecile. 

Anyone can laugh at the department heads on C-SPAN, but did you ever stop 
to think about who's really doing the hardcore research for the NSA at Ft. 
Meade--and elsewhere? And did you ever think that they may have decided 
it's in their best interest to let otherwise informed and intelligent 
people like you laugh them off as third-rate and underfunded? Think about 
it.

>Similarly consider the CIA, whose assessments of the Soviet Union
>were consistently less accurate than my own.

Not everyone who wrote assessments for CIA got them past the politicized 
review of deputy director Gates. As you may know, the whole culture in the 
80s was characterized by a deep rift between two warring factions who 
literally referred to each other as "knuckledraggers" and "commie symps." 
If the symps had the upper hand instead of the knuckledraggers under Casey, 
there's not a doubt in my mind you would have seen an entirely different 
kind of intelligence product. 

The same old resentments are still there: just yesterday I heard Michael 
Pillsbury, a former defense policy planner in the Reagan administration, 
repeatedly refer to analysts who disagreed with him as "panda huggers" 
during the course of his testimony before the Senate. The hardliners he 
called "blue team". (Gee, I wonder which side he was on!) I guess "panda 
huggers" is a little better than "commie symps" but it sure says a lot 
about the intellectual climate. It won't come as a surprise when we start 
seeing the same kind of analytic mistakes again because of it...


>It appears to me that the level of corruption, laziness,
>irresponsibility, and sheer incompetence is fairly uniform
>throughout all branches of the government and all its activities.

I'm sure the senior scientists at Ft. Meade couldn't be more delighted to 
hear you say that. 

~Faustine.