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Comment by mturmon | Hacker News Reader

So funny to read, and with smart commentary by Aaronson about the divergence of interests between the NSA and the university crypto community.

I have pitched tech to the NSA before, and it seemed like they were more interested in benchmarking the capabilities of the outside world than in actually adopting the technology we were pitching.

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>> I have pitched tech to the NSA before, and it seemed like they were more interested in benchmarking the capabilities of the outside world than in actually adopting the technology we were pitching.

That should be step one. They should not be interested in what you were pitching without benchmarking first right?

Yes, but benchmarking appeared to be step one of one total.

I kid! My quantum computation friends had much more success, for a while.

If leaked NSA budget figures are accurate the agency's annual budget is equal to the endowments of Harvard and Stanford combined. I'm therefore inclined to view academia as a farm team for NSA.

Harvard's endowment is $36.4B: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_University

Stanford's endowment is $21.4B: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_University

NSA's budget is ~$11B: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency

The entire black budget is ~$53B: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/black-...

Well that still leaves the NSA with much more money per year than Harvard and Stanford combined, although that does not say much about the intellectual output.

Your broader point is well taken (e.g. Harvard's FY14 budget was $4.4B), but no university relies on distributions from its endowment for most of its operating budget. The balance comes mostly from tuition and government funding, with fortunate universities like the two you mention also receiving gifts earmarked for immediate use.

It isn't really that interesting to compare the NSA budget to the Harvard or Stanford budget, because in neither case is the entire budget going to crypto research, nor can we casually assume any sort of percentage equivalency. The question is how much effort is the NSA putting into crypto research vs. the academic community as a whole, and I imagine we don't have a good way to answer that question. Even raw dollars wouldn't necessarily tell the whole story, since the NSA cryptographers probably have an easier time working together on focused tasks, which both lead to more progress on said tasks while at the same time potentially leaving entirely unresearched areas if groupthink/consensus/management says there's no point to researching something. (I would imagine management uses a relatively light touch if a researcher asserts that something needs to be dug into, but groupthink is a inevitable.) Consequently characterization of where they are ahead and potentially where they may even be behind is probably a bit difficult, since the situation is in reality probably very complex and unknowable to anyone outside the NSA.

"The question is how much effort is the NSA putting into crypto research vs. the academic community, and I imagine we don't have a good way to answer that question."

Actually we do. Network-centric warfare, financial market stability, policy planning, diplomacy and law enforcement do not rely on the academic community for the integrity and security of their systems. They do rely on the NSA. Its not unreasonable to infer the NSA access to funding and intellectual talent in the face of a credible threat or worthwhile opportunity is practically unlimited as compared to academia.

Yes, the commentary on the nationality of each author is definitely in the category of "benchmarking the capabilities of the outside world".

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