If the IA department in the NSA were smart enough to figure out every vulnerability that the SIGINT department discovered and got everything fixed, SIGINT would be impotent. Clearly, things like SELinux make SIGINT's job harder, but your suggestion that SIGINT should handicap itself is ludicrous on its face.

Consider a few salient states: the U.S., Iran, Russia, ... If computers worldwide are mostly secure, which see the greatest benefit? If they're a festering pile of vulnerabilities, which see the greatest cost? That's the choice, as U.S. policy, of where you can focus your efforts. It's not a choice of secure U.S. computers and insecure Russian ones.

The way you're framing it presumes SIGINT is in charge and positively welcomes insecure U.S. computers. I'm saying that's bad for us. I've seen others saying the same.

Also, secure computers would not make spying go away, and SIGINT would not be impotent. Its powers are still increasing with, e.g., surveillance of whole populations from the air with high-res video cameras. Comms spying would go back to retail instead of wholesale data collection.

> The way you're framing it presumes SIGINT is in charge.

You fundamentally misunderstood my post, whiis causing you to reach strange conclusions. Neither is "in charge." They are two separate entities with separate missions. Some of the systems developed and documented by IA make the job of SIGINT difficult if our adversaries implement them as well.

How would spying from the air have prevented Iran from developing it's nuclear program?

Well, I said the spying mission of NSA should not override the security of the U.S., and pointed to the contrast between the old sometimes-improvement of crypto standards and the new backdooring of them. You answered that my "suggestion that SIGINT should handicap itself is ludicrous on its face." I don't care if the NSA's SIGINT department does not value our information security; we, the citizens, do. Their narrow departmental interest goes against our interest. The NSA as a whole used to better approximate that interest, back sometime in the 20th century, even if very imperfectly (see Bamford's history). This conversation was missing this point about the NSA's broader mission.

Iran with nukes seems to me a lesser threat to us than an uncontrolled U.S. government.

> The NSA as a whole used to better approximate that interest, back sometime in the 20th century, even if very imperfectly (see Bamford's history).

There is no evidence that anything has changed.

> Iran with nukes seems to me a lesser threat to us than an uncontrolled U.S. government.

Who is suggesting that the government should be uncontrolled? Iran with nukes is a far greater threat than the NSA with 0-days, which is what we're discussing.