ladies and gentlemen, or did anyone else catch that tone of truly
intolerable arrogance? Did they guy have to make the remark about
our missing Woodstock because we were busy with our
trigonometry? Do spook mathematicians permanently cooped up
inside Fort Meade consider that a funny remark? I'd like to make an
even more amusing observation -- that I've seen scarier secret
police agencies than his completely destroyed by a Czech hippie
playwright with a manual typewriter.
Is the NSA unaware that the current President of the United
States once had a big bushel-basket-full of hair? What does he
expect from the computer community? Normality? Sorry pal, we're
fresh out! Who is it, exactly, that the NSA considers a level-headed
sober sort, someone to sit down with and talk to seriously? Jobs?
Wozniak? Gates? Sculley? Perot -- I hope to God it's not Perot.
Bob Allen -- okay, maybe Bob Allen, that brownshoe guy from AT&T.
Bob Allen seems to think that Clipper is a swell idea, at least he's
somehow willing to merchandise it. But Christ, Bob Allen just gave
eight zillion dollars to a guy whose idea of a good time is Microsoft
Windows for Spaceships!
When is the NSA going to realize that Kapor and his people and
Rotenberg and his people and the rest of the people here are as good
as people get in this milieu? Yes they are weird people, and yes they
have weird friends (and I'm one of them), but there isn't any
normality left for anybody in this society, and when it comes to
computers, when the going got weird the weird turned pro! The
status quo is *over!* Wake up to it! Get used to it!
Where in hell does a crowd of spooks from Fort Meade get off
playing "responsible adults" in this situation? This is a laugh and a
half! Bobby Ray Inman, the legendary NSA leader, made a stab at
computer entrepreneurism and rapidly went down for the third time.
Then he got out of the shadows of espionage and into the bright
lights of actual public service and immediately started gabbling like
a daylight-stricken vampire. Is this the kind of responsive public
official we're expected to blindly trust with the insides of our
phones and computers? Who made him God?
You know, it's a difficult confession for a practiced cynic like
me to make, but I actually trust EFF people. I do; I trust them;
there, I've said it. But I wouldn't trust Bobby Ray Inman to go down
to the corner store for a pack of cigarettes.
You know, I like FBI people. I even kind of trust them, sort of,
kind of, a little bit. I'm sorry that they didn't catch Kevin Mitnick
here. I'm even sorry that they didn't manage to apprehend Robert
Steele, who is about one hundred times as smart as Mitnick and ten
thousand times as dangerous. But FBI people, I think your idea of
Digital Telephony is a scarcely mitigated disaster, and I'll tell you
