What does the NSA think of academic cryptographers? Recently-declassified document provides clues by Scott Aaronson.
From the post:
Brighten Godfrey was one of my officemates when we were grad students at Berkeley. He’s now a highly-successful computer networking professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he studies the wonderful question of how we could get the latency of the Internet down to the physical limit imposed by the finiteness of the speed of light. (Right now, we’re away from that limit by a factor of about 50.)
Last week, Brighten brought to my attention a remarkable document: a 1994 issue of CryptoLog, an NSA internal newsletter, which was recently declassified with a few redactions. The most interesting thing in the newsletter is a trip report (pages 12-19 in the newsletter, 15-22 in the PDF file) by an unnamed NSA cryptographer, who attended the 1992 EuroCrypt conference, and who details his opinions on just about every talk. If you’re interested in crypto, you really need to read this thing all the way through, but here’s a small sampling of the zingers:
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Are there any leaked copies of more recent issues of CryptoLog?
I ask because of the recent outcry about secure encryption of cell phones by default. The government should not be able to argue both ways, one that non-government cryptography work is valueless and at the same time, deprive the average citizen of some modicum of privacy. Which is it?
I know the FBI wants us to return to physical phone lines and junction boxes so they can use their existing supply of wire tapping gear but that’s just not going to happen. Promise.