"Oh, I gotta hear this," Scott said reclining in the deep plush cloth covered couch. "Once upon a time, a super secret agency, no one ever spoke the initials, but it begins with the National Security Agency, got elected by the Department of Defense to work out communications security during the Cold War. They took their job very seriously. "Then along came NIST and IBM who developed DES. The DOD formed the Computer Security Initiative and then the Computer Security Evaluation Center. The DOD CSEC became the DOD Computer Security and then after NSA realized that everybody knew who they were, it became the NCSC. Following this?" Scott nodded only not to disrupt the flow. "Ok, in 1977, Carter signed a bill that said to NSA, you take over the classified national security stuff, but he gave the dregs, the unclassified stuff to the NTIA, a piece of Commerce. But that bill made a lot of people unhappy. So, along comes Reagan who says, no that's wrong, before we get anything con- structive done, let me issue a Directive, number 145, and give everything back to NSA. "That pissed off even more people and Congress then passed the Computer Security Act of 1987, stripped NSA of what it had and gave NIST the unclassified stuff. As a result, NSA closed the NCSC, NIST is underbudgeted by a factor of 100 and in short, they all want a piece of a very small pie. That took over 4 years. And that's whose fault it is. "Whose?" "Congress of course. Congress passes the damn laws and then won't fund them. Result? I get stuck in the middle of third tier rival agency technocrats fighting over their turf or shirking responsibility, and well , you get the idea. So I've got ECCO to talk to CERT to talk to NIST to talk to . . .and it goes on ad nauseum." "Sorry I asked," joked Scott. "In other words," Ty admitted, "I don't have the first foggy idea what we'll do. They all seem hell bent on power instead of fixing the problem. And the scary part?" "What's that?" "It looks like it can only get worse." * * * * * Tuesday, November 11 White House Press Room "Mr. President," asked the White House correspondent for Time magazine. "A recent article in the City Times said that the military has been hiding a super weapon for years that is capable of disabling enemy computers and electronics from a great dis- tance without any physical destruction. Is that true, sir, and has the use of those weapons contributed to the military's suc- cesses over the last few years?"