Interested in the whole cookie flap?
The National Security Agency is a cream-of-the-crop spy operation; it has some of the best spooks that money and calls to patriotism (or coërcion) can buy; and it has a black-box budget. Anti-spyware and cookie deletion utilities bought at Elmer's Discount House o' Software aren't going to stop spies who want to know what you're doing; and manually going into the cookies folder on your computer, finding a cookie with the name "Joe@nsa.txt," and deleting it does not in any way, shape, or form give you bragging rights for outsmarting the National Security Agency.
If spies want you to know they've been in your computer, they'll make it so you can see that they've been there. If those same spies don't want you to know they've been there, they'll make sure you don't.
This is related to the matter of why it is that the U.S. releases people from detention where they've been tortured, knowing full well those people, once they're freed, are going to run around screaming, "I've been tortured! I've been tortured!" If our good national security folks don't want it known that someone was tortured, it won't be known. In the same way, if our good national security folks don't want it known that they've been watching you, then you won't know.
In most instances, when we "discover" something the spies have been doing, it's either because they don't care or more likely because they want to advertise, and all the howling upon discovery of the obvious gives them a megaphone at the same time the howling throws in the value-added red herring for their purposes.
To believe otherwise is to assign to our spooks the same level of stupidity possessed by our President and his cabal of crooked, incompetent cronies. Rest assured that, unlike George W. Bush, the operational-level folks at the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, and all the other agencies of ill intent are not stupid, nor are they incompetent.
They are dangerous, mean, frightening, untrustworthy, vicious, and nasty; but they're not stupid.
From The Dark Wraith, whom I should link to far more often.
Posted by binky at December 31, 2005 03:10 PM | TrackBack | Posted to J. Edgar Hoover | The Ever Shrinking Constitution