Snowden Induced Mea Culpas

[John Young]

Comsec experts should not be surprised at the Snowden
revelations about NSA so far, most of which are venerable.

What is surprising is their seemingly exaggerated surprise
because many of them worked at or ran firms which were
known to be heavily involved with official spying through
dual-use technology and dual-purpose contracts.

With USG and world governments, with banks and telecoms,
with comsec, software and anti-virus firms, with universities
and research institutes, with FOI organizations and public
interest advisory boards, with vulture investors, TED and
Aspen, with revolving doors among goverment, industry,
education, journalism, banking and Wall Street, with RAND,
NRL, the national laboratories, to name a few.

In most instances these dual roles were not hidden.
Or were they?

What might be troubling about Snowden's possible
revelations that is causing exaggerated surprise of
these experts is the disclosure that the dual-uses
and dual-roles in spying were more extensive than
has been made public. That has been protected by
highest secrecy about to be breached, not about
the spy agencies but those used to camouflage
and assist the spying by downplaying its pervasiveness
by selling protection that could never be wholly
effective, that the cybersec game was as rigged
as gambling.

That the backdoors, vulnerabilities, holes, faults,
and errors were more craftily hidden and exploited
with the complicity of the best and brightest while
they deluded the the public for market share and
FOI fame. That it was a charade to agitate for more
security and privacy while undermining them. That
Snowden has the documents about that ancient
betrayal and will at some point make them available.
That it would be wise to get ahead of this exposure
by rushing to claim the spying has been greater
than even we experts knew and comsec is a
fraud by design. Crypto-AG the norm.