Traceable Infrastructure is as vulnerable as traceable messages.

[Faustine]

Jim wrote:
> Faustine:
>> 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?
> 
> To judge by their most recent crypto ballsup, some donut chomping 
> incompetents.

That's just as inaccurate as condeming everyone who ever worked for 
Microsoft as clueless because of their corporate propensity for security 
lapses. You wouldn't go that far, would you? Didn't think so... LOL

I know of an old-school NSA red teamer who's been teaching programming and 
engineering since before either one of us was born. An honest-to-god 
mathematical genius. Some of those old wizards could teach us all a thing 
or two. But whether the donut-chomping incompetents have the upper hand is 
anyone's guess. I wouldn't bet on it in the long run.


>> 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 commie symps favored the "alliance for progress", which shows they
> were even further out of contact with reality than the 
> knuckledraggers.  

Maybe, but I have more of an issue with the "cook the books to support my 
policy" angle than anything else. There's a great article by James 
Worthen, "The Gates Hearings: Politicization and Soviet Analysis at CIA" 
from Studies in Intelligence (Vol. 38, No.1, Spring 1994). I wish I had a 
pdf (or whatever the "correct" format is in light of the Adobe boycott), 
lots of relevant quotes to pull.

~Faustine.