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hbaker1@pipeline.com
Date: Sat, 04 Aug 2018 15:24:15 -0700

Is it just me, or is anyone else in computer science annoyed by James
Clapper's recent apology book tour, during which he blames everyone but the intelligence community for Hillary Clinton's 30,000 lost emails?

Having been involved in the computer science field for half a century, with a personal email history almost as old, I can recall the heavy hand of the intelligence community in monopolizing encryption technology and criminalizing its export. The intelligence community's watchword: "NOBUS", meaning "NObody But U.S." (may use high-quality encryption and authentication).

This heavy hand made it impossible to incorporate encryption and authentication into the fabric of everyday computer systems, and hence impossible for computers to *routinely* protect ordinary communications like emails.

Only after Bernstein v. United States (1999) and Junger v. Daley (2000) was encryption finally permitted to become a fully integrated component of everyday computer systems.

The computer science community thus lost *forty years* of experience and software development that would have led to email systems capable of storing
Hillary's emails securely -- even in her home closet.

As the recent "Spectre" class of CPU vulnerabilities demonstrates, we are still living with legacy of this intelligence community "unwitting" (I prefer "witless") blunder.

I would like to repeat to James Clapper what my grandmother used to say to me when I was a child: "when you point your (index) finger at someone, your other four fingers are pointing at yourself."

I also have a better suggestion for the name of Clapper's book:

"Redacts and Sneers: Half Truths from a Liar in Intelligence"

rather than

"Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence"

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/06/clapper-frets-over-past-damage-present-shortcomings-future-threats-to-us-intelligence/

Christina Pazzanese Harvard Staff Writer 22 Jun 2018
The worries over U.S. intelligence

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper says he felt compelled to speak out about President Trump and the investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 election.


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