From: Adam Shostack <adam@bwh.harvard.edu>
Date: Sat, 1 Oct 94 08:25:54 PDT
To: merriman@metronet.com (David K. Merriman)
Subject: Re: Friendly, neighborhood NSA...
In-Reply-To: <199410010522.AA01650@metronet.com>
Message-ID: <199410011525.LAA26350@bwh.harvard.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


| LEAD AGENCY/ORGANIZATION:  NSA
| CONTACT NAME:  Norma Davila   
| PHONE #:  301/688-7353

| The "Digital Librarian" links together the libraries where
| information of any type (books, texts, pictures, audio, video,
| multi-media, etc.) is stored to the librarians who assist the
| users in navigating through these storehouses of knowledge.  This
| project brings these ideas to the desktop by allowing a user to
| gain access to any number of information sources, independent of
| the originating development of the sources.  The information
| sources can be anything from databases to online reference
| materials to online training materials.  The user interacts with
| these sources through one common interface.
|----
| Out of the kindness of it's heart, the NSA is going to build us all a nice,
| new, improved WWW!
| 
| Isn't that just *too* kind of them?
| 
| I wonder why I have this feeling I'd better not turn my back on them.....

	I'd be suprised if they did this without releasing source.  As
soon as they release source, we can drop real encryption into things.
Much as we dislike them, the NSA is *very* good at sorting through and
dealing with huge quantities of data.  ("Its in their nature.")  If we
can take advantage of this, and get a WWW design that is relatively
secure, then thats great.  All we'll need to do is remove the calls to
skipjack(), and replace them with calls to IDEA(). :)

	The NSA is not some huge monolithic enemy.  It is a teaming
multitude of enemies.  Like any other government agency, we need to
tale the good and discard the rest.

Adam