Re: Is the NSA really competent?

Here are the biggest breakthroughs in cryptography during the period
  when the NSA has been the purported leader in the field, and 
  has enjoyed by far the largest budget:
  
  [ list of major breakthroughs deleted. ]
  
  For all their vaunted competence, for all the mathematicians
  they have been alleged to employ, despite having a cryptography
  budget orders of magnitude larger than any other Western
  crypto group, it looks like the NSA contribued to _none_ of 
  the major advances in cryptography that occured during its zenith.
  

My understanding is that we don't *know* what NSA actually has found.
For example, *someone* knew about differential cryptanalysis long before
Adi Shamir rediscovered it, as the DES S-boxes are optimized against it.
Similarly, they may have discovered public-key encryption fifty years
ago and simply not bothered to patent/publish it....

	- Patrick

p.s.  Any other cypherpunks heading to ACL this week?  If so, look
me up (Patrick Juola, U. of Colorado) and we can go grab a brew or
something and discuss the state of the world.... pmj