Re: NSA says strong crypto to china??

["Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>]

Alex Strasheim writes:
> If this is true, it's great news.  It would mean that the NSA is adopting
> both cypherpunk analysis and tactics.  Who would have thought?  An NSA 
> remade in Tim May's image.

I suspect that the NSA was thinking in our terms long before many of
us were aware of cryptography. I actually think that in many cases,
their behavior is perfectly rational. Their goals are merely
different. If you are in SIGINT, I believe that the possibility of
totally losing a valued intelligence tool must heavily weigh on your
mind. Of course, they are hardly monolithic, and different groups at
the NSA necessarily have different goals.

Once SIGINT becomes much harder regardless of their previous attempts
to stop it, I suspect that the NSA will become a friend and not an
impediment. By that time, of course, the "we have to protect our
people" types will be the only ones producing results and getting
funding, and the "we have to gather information" types will have long
ceased to produce. Thats probably a decade or more off, though.

Perry