Secrets and who can keep them

I was mining my blog for some unrelated information (isn’t that always how it starts, eh?) when I came upon this post I wrote last December after the job networking site LinkedIn had its entire password database stolen. I made the point that 99% of passwords being used out there are trivially cracked by modern computers.

The post made me recall how time and again how the federal government has sounded the alarm over how vulnerable American business is to cyberattack. In light of the revelations of massive, illegal NSA spying on Americans, these warnings seem patently ludicrous. You see, the whole time the federal government has played the cybersecurity good guy in public, in reality the last thing it wants is for American business to secure its data. Make it secure, they tell us. Just don’t make it too secure.

Yeah, right.