[Cryptography] RSA is dead.

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 10:18 PM, Jerry Leichter <leichter at lrw.com> wrote:

>
> Look, I'm not defending NSA.  I'm telling you that I, and many other
> people I knew, and from what I could see most members of the broader
> community, were fooled by their charm offensive.  If you found little
> support in those years - this is why.  You were out-maneuvered by some of
> the best professionals in the business.
>

This is why I think it is so important to think rather harder about the
NSA/RSA issue than assume that the $10 million was paid as a direct pro quo
to a company that knew they were taking a bribe.

If defeating the NSA was so easy, all we would need to do is to be on the
look out for people taking huge bribes. But that is not the simplest or the
safest way for the NSA to have achieved their objective so it is almost
certainly not the tactic they used.


I think we also need to have the right mode for the people running the NSA.
I don't doubt their patriotism or their devotion to duty. But I have met
ex-NSA directors and they all suffer from the limitations of the military
mind. They have a particular comfort zone which is based on their
experience of what they call 'kinetic' warfare. They don't like facing up
to the realities of what they are doing so they talk in jargon designed to
insulate themselves from the moral consequences of their decisions.

When they are outside their comfort zone they are liable to panic.

We saw this happen on a massive scale in the 1950s and 60s. The series of
coups in emerging democracies were all engineered by elites panicking at
the prospect of popular government. In many cases the US elites that
panicked first.


I do not believe that it is safe to let these people loose with such power.
Hayden in particular strikes me as the type of person who might well panic
and declare martial law if he thought the republic under threat. The
problem is that I strongly suspect that the sort of things he considers a
threat are rather different to the ones I consider threats.

There is a large portion of the power elite in the US that spends its time
talking about the President being born in Kenya and equating Obamacare to
communism and talking about traitors. When people do that sort of thing I
suspect them of being the traitors themselves and working up a pretext.


-- 
Website: http://hallambaker.com/
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