"From the beginning," he said. "I told you about ECCO, and what a disaster it is. No authority, no control, no responsibility. And the chaos is unbelievable. "I don't pretend to understand all of the computer jargon, but I do recognize when the NSA wants to control everything. There's a phenomenal amount of arrogance there. The NSA reps in ECCO believe that they are the only ones who know anything about computers and how to protect them. I feel sorry for the guys from NIST. They're totally underfunded, so they end up with both the grunt work and the brunt of the jokes from the NSA. "NSA won't cooperate on anything. If NIST says it's white, NSA says it's black. If NIST says there's room to compromise, NSA gets more stubborn. And the academic types. At long last I now know what happened to the hippies: they're all government con- sultants through universities. And all they want to do is study, study, study. But they never come up with answers, just more questions to study. "The vendors try to sell their products and don't contribute a damn thing," sighed Tyrone. "A bunch of industry guys from computer companies and the banks, and they're as baffled as I am." "So why quit? Can't you make a difference?" "Listen. The FBI views computer crimes as inter-state in nature and therefore under their domain." Scott nodded in understanding. "We are enforcement, only," Tyrone asserted. "We do not, nor should we make the laws. Separation of power; Civics 101. To accomplish anything, I have to be a private citizen." "What do you want to accomplish?" asked Scott with great inter- est. "I want to stop the NSA." Tyrone spoke bluntly and Scott sat too stunned to speak for long seconds. "From what?" A sudden pit formed in Scott's stomach. "I found out why they dumped on you about the CMR," Tyrone said. "I haven't been able to tell you before, but it doesn't matter any more." Tyrone quickly shook off the veiling sadness. "NSA has a built-in contradiction. On one hand they listen into the world and spy for America. This is supposed to be very secret, especially how they do it. It turns out that CMR is one of their 'secret' methods for spying on friends and foes alike. "So, to keep our friends and foes from spying on us, they create the secret Tempest program. Except, they think it needs to be kept a military secret, and the public sector be damned. They actually believe that opening the issue to the public will hamper their intelligence gathering capabilities because the enemy will protect against it, too." Scott listened in fascination. What he was learning now more than made up for the loss of one article. He felt bad now that he had overreacted and taken it out on Tyrone. "Same goes for the EMP-T bomb," Tyrone added. "Only they didn't know that you were going to publish ahead of time like they did when I opened up my fat trap."