To David and Rick, I posted links supporting my beliefs, that detailed the facts as far as they are currently known about TIA and Venona. I have seen little in your posts about websites, books or information supporting your views. I can't agree with the view that this forum is inappropriate for this discussion, nor do I believe that any of us knows the answers. But we should all be thinking about the questions, and who might know the answers. TIA originated prior to the current administration, and Net Neutrality is anything but neutral, just as Al Gore invented the internet. However, I do know some people who are pretty familiar with these issues, and their opinions on some of these bits of spying would boggle your mind. Why does NSA hare a 17 Terraflop computer? Did you know it can be further expanded? What kind of disk storage do you think you might utilize with a 17Terraflop computer? And there is more than one computer available to them. Shared tasking, multithreading, multiprocessing systems are simple to build today, and when a desktop can reach 400+Megaflops, it is not too terribly difficult to reach such esoteric processing speeds. But what would they be used for? NOAA only needs 1.7Terraflops for weather simulations. The Nuclear Simulation is currently running on a 2.5Terraflop machine. What on earth could you do with 17 Terraflops? Or more? A search engine with a webcrawler doesn't make direct copies of the information, but rather references the information. Such references can be coded in very compact ways, provided one has the desire to create the code means. True that all of us have some ideal of transfer speeds, given the uses of Bittorrent transfers, and the setups of complex schemes often don't go well, but the programming power and time devoted to the task is enormous compared to the dedicated resources at typical software companies. After all, what is the risk of comming in second in a war? Moreover, the US has become Information Wealthy, and that translates to a Target of information, vs one of stone and mortar. We do not yet realize the extent and volume of dependency that our culture has on this information. Losing control of that edge is now the equivalent of not having sufficient ships and admirals to conduct the Napoleonic wars. Do you know exactly what a Trojan Horse, a Worm, a Virus, a backdoor or a rootkit actually does? How do each gain access to your system? Which software techniques can defeat each one? I am not as savvy as I once was, but the topics of these issues and system security are always on my mind. Perhaps you sincerely believe that the only option is to "kick down the door and get it". If so, you are not yet fully conversant with the extent to which system penetration can affect you. Do you know how files are erased? Do you use a shredder program? Are any of your systems fully encrypted? If so, what is the keystream length? How can you check it? Is the keystream monotonic? Is it equally weighted or is it ascii weighted? Perhaps unicode weighted? How random is the seeding process and how does it sync with the remote system? PS, encryption is a "realtime process." It seldom has verymuch overhead. For example the 8 bit keystream in a cellphone requires only 9 operations per coded bit. a 128 bit keystream properly coded would only require about 32 operations per coded bit. Since encryption and decryption are mirror operations, the same number of operations in essence will do encoding and decoding. With today's processors this is about a microsecond of operation. Regards, Les H
