Re: The NSA (Was Re: Factoring - State of the Art and Predictions )

[aegis@netcom.com (Dale Harrison)]

>I think the NSA has lost its edge completely in the last decade,
>as cryptographic research in the open community has taken off. It
>is much the same sort of situation experienced by IBM, when they
>were slow to catch on to the paradigm shift created by
>distributed computing and workstations, and companies like Sun
>rose from nowhere to become major players.
>
>If the NSA were a corporation, they would be apologizing to their
>shareholders, restructuring, and trying to identify a market
>niche they could continue to be a player in.  Since they are
>funded by government, we don't see them doing this, but it is
>absurd to suggest that they are still decades ahead of the rest
>of the world in basic research and technology.

As a former civilian TS Clearance holder working for the government, I can 
tell you I was amazed at what a small percentage of classified material 
really deserves to be classified.  90% of what I saw could be categorized as 
1)trival, 2)in the public domain already, or 3)politically embarrassing.  
For example, look at the long classified human radiation experiments just 
coming to light. The government certainly wasn't hidding that info from the 
Russians, they were hiding it from the voters. I remember once fighting for 
months to get access to some classified papers on the fracture 
characteristics of ceramics only to find them to contain nothing that hadn't 
been available in the public domain for 20 years. This of course has a lot 
to do with the strange sociology of government bureacracies where the 
combination of classified information with need-to-know restrictions create 
powerful petty-fiefdoms that lead to increased perks and prestige.  The 
other thing to realize is that inside the bureacracies there's little in the 
way of the vigorous competion of ideas (primarily because of the 
manipulation of need-to-know restrictions) that characterizes academia.  
Bureaucracies tend to foster myopia and tunnel vision rather than risk 
taking and originality.  My guess (and it's only that) is that if all of 
NSA's secrets were laid bare, maybe 10% of what they have would be truely 
unique and the other 90% would be surprisingly pedestrian.

Dale H.

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  Dale W. Harrison, president       |  TEL: (713) 682-0501
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