A pristine layer of thick soft snow covered the sprawling office and laboratory filled campus where the National Bureau of Stand- ards sets standards for the country. The NBS establishes exactly what the time is, to the nearest millionth of a millionth of a second. They make sure that we weigh things to the accuracy of the weight of an individual atom. The NBS is a veritable techno- logical benchmark to which everyone agrees, if for no other reason than convenience. It was the NBS's turn to host the National Computer Security Conference where the Federal government was ostensibly supposed to interface with academia and the business world. At this exclusive symposium, only two years before, the Department of Defense introduced a set of guidelines which detailed security specifications to be used by the Federal agencies and recommended for the private sector. A very dry group of techno-wizards and techno-managers and tech- no-bureaucrats assemble for several days, twice a year, to dis- cuss the latest developments in biometric identifications tech- niques, neural based cryptographic analysis, exponential factor- ing in public key management, the subtleties of discretionary access control and formalization of verification models. The National Computer Security Center is a Department of Defense working group substantially managed by the super secret National Security Agency. The NCSC's charter in life is to establish standards and procedures for securing the US Government's comput- ers from compromise. 1985's high point was an award banquet with slightly ribald speeches. Otherwise the conference was essentially a maze of highly complex presentations, meaningless to anyone not well versed in computers, security and government-speak. An attend- ee's competence could be well gauged by his use of acronyms. "If the IRS had DAC across its X.25 gateways, it could integrate X9.17 management, DES, MAC and X9.9 could be used throughout. Save the government a bunch!" "Yeah, but the DoD had an RFI for an RFQ that became a RFP, specced by NSA and based upon TD-80-81. It was isolated, environmentally speaking." Boring, thought Miles Foster. Incredibly boring, but it was his job to sit, listen and learn. Miles Foster was a security and communications analyst with the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland. It was part of the regimen to attend such functions to stay on top of the latest developments from elsewhere in the government and from university and private research programs.