Kesher Talk

The internet and security. Very interesting interview with Whit Diffie, one of the inventors of public key encryption, who seems to have been a socially-cloistered geek who decided that learning about the social sphere wasn't a bad thing.

You do become compromised, but at the same time, you don't regret becoming compromised, because you learned interesting things; you were involved with interesting people. I started out thinking of myself as NSA's opponent, but within a few years, as a result of studying its technologies and activities, I developed a great deal more sympathy for intelligence overall. In the context of the Cold War, the worst possible thing was to imagine two blind men in a room with machine guns. Intelligence was a stabilizing phenomena in international relations in a way that I thought liberals were blind to.

(via a blog link I don't remember - let me know if it was yours and I'll give you credit.)

posted by Judith @ 12/18/2002 02:49:19 PM