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It seems to be a sort of universal truth in that the people trying to break a system will always be ahead of people trying to secure/protect it. Why then, would prioritizing COMSEC over SIGINT change any of that? COMSEC will never catch up to SIGINT.

I'm curious to know what exactly the NSA currently does to protect the US. Do they already use their existing SIGINT knowledge to update systems ahead of attacks?

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Well, maybe the lemma is flawed. Maybe they are not always ahead. I mean, to date, no one has even been able to decode Kryptos, right out front of the CIA in plain view: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptos

Again, what the NSA does to protect the US is an open question; if they did their job right, you'll likely not know it. Updating systems, at least large commercial ones that foreign governments use as well as the US citizenry, is not in the purview of their mandate, its the opposite. They do try to tell the world what they do, so as to justify themselves in some degree to their ultimate bosses (the US voting public). The Iranian nuke viruses are a good example, though, as far as I know, they have not claimed that particular hack yet.

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