Wikileaks: NSA funding of academics

Tyler Durden camera_lumina at hotmail.com
Fri Nov 23 14:25:47 PST 2007


That's pretty interesting.

During the Variola debates concerning how much NSA could actually backhaul, I
made the point that some a lot could probably be ascertained by looking at
what NSA was funding publicly.

For example, by looking at NSA funding of burst-mode optical networking, one
could infer that NSA probably has a significant gap in terms of what they WANT
to grab and what they actually can grab and backhaul (plus, there are certain
fundamental limits to optical systems that would lead one to conclude
something similar). This, I believe, is confirmed by what was revealed about
the NSA "secret room" in AT&T's CO in the Bay Area.

Arguably, a well-done and perhaps trust-based wiki could wiggle a lot of out
what NSA is involved in, but of course there'd still be huge gaps. On the
other hand, in some areas (such as chip fabrication) I think it's getting safe
to say that NSA can't be more than one generation ahead of existing
fabrication technologies, if at all. Thus, one could make some accurate
upper-bound statements about capabilities and add that to the known funding.

Does NSA fund stuff just to avoid precisely this type of reverse engineering?
I'd bet they do, and learned to do so during the soviet era. But I also
suspect it's possible to sniff those out too.

-TD




> Date: Thu, 22 Nov 2007 09:30:45 +0100> From: eugen at leitl.org> To:
cypherpunks at al-qaeda.net> Subject: Wikileaks: NSA funding of academics> >
----- Forwarded message from John Gilmore <gnu at toad.com> -----> > From: John
Gilmore <gnu at toad.com>> Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2007 11:57:27 -0800> To:
cryptography at metzdowd.com> cc: whitfield.diffie at sun.com, gnu at toad.com>
Subject: Wikileaks: NSA funding of academics> >
https://secure.wikileaks.org/wiki/On_the_take_and_loving_it> > Grant code
'MDA904' - National Security Agency> > The NSA has pushed tens or hundreds of
millions into the academy> through research grants using one particular grant
code. ...> > John> >
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Cryptography Mailing List> Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography"
to majordomo at metzdowd.com> > ----- End forwarded message -----> -- > Eugen*
Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org>
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