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Some government agencies have good kids pages. I was particularly impressed with the NSA's kid's page, which has a lot of great math puzzles.

The NSA website has an interesting kids section - it has some educational material as well as a lot of related puzzles. Kids interested in computers and/or cryptography or solving puzzles in general will enjoy it.

Check it out http://www.nsa.gov/programs/kids/.

For every Napster there are a dozen gnutella, hotline, audiogalaxy's... for each of those there's likely to be a clandestine effort to do the same thing.

Besides... we all know there will be someone M$ won't be able to stop.

> Isn't Trusted Solaris basically just this? At an OS level, you associate trust levels that permeate throughout your network.

I think this kind of approach is better than creating virtual machine sandboxes that still run the old weak UNIX security model. If someone 0wns your sandboxed apache, they can still likely cause
a DoS with it, or propogate worms, or pretty much anything really.

Good use of iptables and linux "capabilities" can help a lot with limiting what an application can do, but still don't go far enough, IMHO.

Look at projects like SELinux, LIDS, RSBAC, LOMAC
for examples of "free software" alternate security models.

And yeah, they're a pain for development, but then so is trying to program securely :)

- MugginsM

I know it's kind of redundant, considering the other reply but I think I can contribute with this:

The problem with MS Palladium is not the mandatory access controls it imposes (in fact I tried to use MAC on my machine using NSA's selinux), but the fact that the keys are not under the user's (or user's OS/security manager) control is.
That leaves microsoft with the privilege of dictating your security policy (does microsoft have access to a military's mainframe security policy?, I think not).
In fact, I think the hardware part of Palladium (or at least something similar) could be a great thing, provided the keys (hence the security policy controls) remain with the user. It could probably be used to provide the trusted paths that are mentioned in this paper, preventing malicious programs from spoofing a legitimate service.
I believe that the best thing to do would be to try to use palladium's hardware as an advantage to the open source OSs, using it to enhance its security (if possible).

So, what's going on to keep the MSFT lap-dogs, and their potential customers, informed about SELinux -- and OpenBSD -- in response to the marketing of this "Palladium" thing? Seems like they might be for different sectors of the market (SELinux, OBSD for those who know what they're doing, MSFT-windows for the rest?), but that article doesn't give a lot of details about what "Palladium" is, anyway, no offense.

"trusted Windows technology platform" -- that, in itself, sounds hillarious.

Here's to waiting or digging for details on what this MSFT "nexus" thing is, beneath the flash, hubub, poop, and other marketing.

Now, do y'all get the impression that microsoft is playing this thing right into the workstations of "sensitive" federal offices? If they do this, and succeed in locking those offices into their platform -- if they haven't done so already -- it would be a major blow against the state of the competive market -- within and without "the government sector".

"Jane, how do you stop this crazy thing?!"

I don't know anything about how/if NSA secure Linux development was stoppped, but it nevertheless looks pretty real to me...

I only saw one other mention about government jobs. No one wants to work for the government because they don't think they get paid enough. I think some people are glossing over the most important aspect of it, you get paid. You have a job.

The National Security Agency is always taking interns/coops. I've applied there myself and feel confident that I will get it (I should know in about 3-4 days). Yeah, you need a security clearance. Big deal, it's not that bad. If you've kept your nose clean in your life (don't do drugs for christ's sake, and yes, marijuana counts) you will have no problem passing any of their tests (assuming you're a stable person).

The government has opportunities everywhere, you just have to give up the stigma of 'working for the man' and get on with it. Government jobs have great benefits too.

In case you're interested: here is a link to the NSA coop program. The CIA also hires people.

You will be able to have real world experience, have a valuable security clearance, and most likely a job working there when you graduate.

NSA going to do with all of their newfound freetime? According to the article:

In the future, the Department of Homeland Security will be the U.S. agency that will manage any response to major cyberthreats.

Will the DHS publish Security Recommendation Guides like the NSA?

Why not take the SecureOS approach, and run the SMTP listener in a restricted capabilities role, where all your SMTPd can do is "accept()" TCP sessions on port 25, request DNS lookups, and queue messages to disk?

Mandatory Access Control is what you speak of and it's available in several forms for Linux.

GRSecurity
SELinux
(Anyone know of others?)

Stupid me... missed the preview button. Here's a place to click for the lazy folks... - RR

um, the NSA has already modified linux (the kernel) so that it will meet their standards. redhat is named as a tested distro...see this for details. The biggest problem is that the US government seems to think that they must rely on M$ software (in the unclassified environment at least) for things like exchange and ease of use for the "typical" user.

this is simple posturing at it's finest. of course...the government's high performance systems (read clusters) aren't running windows anyway. this won't change anything.

-frozen

Why did Red Hat bother? I think NSA's Linux kernel at their website is probably better than anything Red Hat has put together. Seems a waste of time and effort for the DOD to certify something when they already have a distro for DOD purposes. I recommend SELinux for it's kernel security (it's only a kernel, no fluff). Red Hat is probably just looking for another revenue stream and DOD decided to go along with it.

at least i can't come through...

nsa homepage

I drive past the NSA National Cryptologic Museum on the way to work every day.

Can't say I've actually seen what it has to offer...

Hmm, I've seen them almost universally described as Jr. and sr., such in dissection of the crisis. (Risks Digest also carried Cornell's self-absolution -- I had no idea "damage estimates" ran as high as $96 million! That's criminal exaggeration, if there is such a thing.)

But the press screwing up names -- it's going to take me some time to readjust. :) (I checking NSA really quick -- did you know they have a secure Linux project? Something about them using Linux surprises me.)

Mr. Morris reminds me of Mrs. O'Leary's cow. (Actually, the cow was recently absolved; a vagrant started the fire. :) It was a mistake to play with the fire, but should the fire have been so scucessful? What kind of system gives a single individual that much power?

Anyone who follows Morris, however, cannot plausibly argue they had no idea of the potential risk. The Melissa author got 20 months for causing (supposedly) $80 million in losses (should that be offset by the extra money made by the media overhyping it?). That idiot in the Philipines who wrote iloveyou -- alleged to have got $10 billion in damages The incident caught the Philippines flat-footed to the point that they ask the U.S. to prosecute. De Guzman had a great thesis proposal ("the Internet should be free"). I don't think he or anyone else was ever punished, because of the inadequacy of then-existing law.

See this mail, this chapter and the rest of the NSA paper

Saying that NSA has characterized Systrace as flawed is wrong, IMO.

See this mail, this chapter and the rest of the NSA paper

Saying that NSA has characterized Systrace as flawed is wrong, IMO.

See this mail, this chapter and the rest of the NSA paper

Saying that NSA has characterized Systrace as flawed is wrong, IMO.

• Browsing of terrorist or dissenting, un-patriotic, or otherwise not wholesome all-american websites.
  
  
• Use of any audio/video compression technology other than lisenced and government approved encoding protocols. No matter if you have no pirate material, If you have the ability and tools, you're dangerous enough!
  
  
• Any expression of dissenting or un-patriotic views or opinions in your messenger histories, message board/newsgroup postings, emails, or slashdot poll votes.

" The reason is that the federal government is not allowed by law to compete against private coorporations. "

Well I guess Microsoft has a legitimate complaint against this.

Man Gets 70mpg in Homemade Car-Made from a Mainframe Computer

Huh? So now you accuse me of lying. To tell you the truth, I don't remember exactly the reasons why the NSA was upset about the GPL, but they WERE. They had some plans for their secure distro, and they realized that those plans were going to be incompatible with the GPL. I'm not making the story up. So you tell me what they were upset about, and if it doesn't apply here, you have won the argument. But I think it does (from what I do remember), and thus my argument stands.

Well, since you didn't look it up yourself, I guess I will do it for you.

To quote the article, "Despite the intense battle surrounding the open source, the NSA will still fund research on secure operating systems based on Linux as well as work with U.S. companies to create better security in their own operating systems."

Two camps were primarily pissed off about it.

1) Microsoft, because the NSA was funding their competitor.

2) Ultra Nationalist who didn't want the benefits of the GPL to go outside the US.

The project is still alive and being developed.

I guess I thought you would have done a little research before blindly posting. Sorry, I was wrong to attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance.

Yes, that is true in the general case. In the case of Linux, we do know that at least one person with some security experience in the NSA has looked at Linux. I don't know the experience of eyes which looked at other OSes -- other than that Multics did get looked at a lot.

Not at all. What I have argued is that most NT installations never use the multiuser capabilities of NT. Almost all security-conscious NT installations connect personal single-user clients to multi-user servers. That does not exercise the multiuser capabilities of the NT kernel or user land libraries/programs at all.

Sorry that you've never used them but they are there.

My point is that if they don't get exercised in practice, you can't trust them. In any case, we already know of a number of security holes in the multi-user capabilities NT/XP without even looking, and even those don't get fixed--because Microsoft doesn't care.

As for security, Windows NT got a C2 security rating and was architected at the B level. Unix was not.

Seems like they fell a bit short, then. Also note that NT is only C2 rated when it isn't networked--not exactly a very useful rating, and something that exercises almost no multi-user capabilities.

In any case, the C2 rating is about the presence of features, not actual security. Many features in C2 are deliberately absent from UNIX because they make systems harder to administer and ultimately less secure.

Linux is being used as the basis of highly secure systems by the NSA, and it has pretty much all the features it would need to get a C2 rating (or better) now--someone with deep pockets just needs to cough up the money for an evaluation. Fortunately, those features are optional because, ultimately, C2 or B are a bad idea.

I think that ALL programs should be running in the equivalent of a sandbox at all times.

This is SELinux.

one of the nicest things you can hope for when trying to gain access to a server is what software and version its running.

Hmm... most crackers use Netcraft to see what sites like the NSA website uses...

The National Security Agency

nsa.gov maybe instead? and not nsa.mil?

1. Defensive ops for US information infrastructure
2. Foreign SIGINT

Now, what is being pointed out to Congress in the document mentioned in this story, is that the hijackers on September 11th were in the country legally, and that domestic SIGINT has not traditionally been the job of the NSA (really, it's the domain of the FBI).

For NSA to go crazy on domestic SIGINT requires an executive order or act of congress to expand its mission. Hence, if Hayden is asking Congress where the line is, they're looking to expand their mission, possibly to include foreign people of interest while they are in the US.

Hayden also mentions their budget and how understaffed they have been. There is no way the entire US education system produces enough linguists to fill the needs of our intelligence agencies, especially now that Russian isn't the hot-button language to know.

If you haven't been paying attention, Hayden has been very open about NSA, his troubles, and his plans for the future of the agency. He's been in numerous print publications as well as features on TV. The two contracts he mentions, GROUNDBREAKER and TRAILBLAZER created a stir in the contractor community simply because they are such a diversion from NSA's MO. He's come right out and told the Washington Post that NSA had a huge computer problem at some point (Winter 2001? I forget...something about a snow storm), in addition to having a top-heavy management system with lots of in-fighting.

Hayden's not the bad guy. He believes in his mission. As do the rest of the people at the Agency. They are the heirs of the legacy of Bletchley Park and the other code breakers of WWII, and they do great work. What we've seen post-911 is the NSA get dragged into a catfight between the FBI and the CIA, neither of whom have been given a director like Hayden.

posted anon. damn FBI would probably decide i was a 'person of interest' and set out to ruin my life.

Don't underestimate cryptanalysts ability in this area, either. The Soviet Union made the mistake of reusing some of their One Time Pads a few decades ago; as a result, Project Venona, was able to decode enormous amounts of archived (but still useful) secret traffic.

Don't think traffic that old is useful? Tell it to the spies who were still in place when Venona broke those old communications.

Check government agencies for kids sites. The NSA, for example, has a good kids page with a lot of math games and puzzles. I don't know how many agencies have such pages, but it would seem really odd (and more than a little creepy) if the NSA were the only one.

And what's up with that "the most secure os" sarcasm? OpenBSD *is* secure.

This definition depends on what you call "secure".

Theo calls an OS with a very limited, trusted set of applications "secure" - however, running secure applications with root privileges has nothing to do with OS level security. That's application level security.

I'd call an OS secure, if you can only hack it by exploiting a bug inside the OS kernel. That means, there is no way of gaining 'root' privileges or something like that by hacking into some highly privileged daemon, provided that the system is configured properly.

To achieve this level of security, it is neccessary to have fine grained privilege and compartmentalization controls instead of the superuser/world distinction built into the OS kernel - and that's still missing in OpenBSD.

What means "secure"?
"[...] Put another way, "secure system" means safe enough to protect some real world information from some real world adversary that the information owner and/or user care about. [...]"
- SE Linux FAQ, NSA

-----

There are mainly two types of secure Operating Systems.
a) Everything up to the C2 level of security
b) Everything from B1 up to A1 (never ever reached by any OS)

The difference is information labeling.
You only get a B1 security certificate, if your OS has mandatory access controls. It must be able to automatically prevent users from mixing secret data with public data. This is often called a "Trusted OS".

Most people don't need information labeling/mandatory access control, because all their data has the same level of sensivity.

TCSEC C2 does not say much about how the OS has to handle privileges, so a C2-level OS can still be very insecure, but it can also be very secure - almost impenetrable - and it still can't ever become certified at B1 or above, because it simply can't handle multiple levels of sensivity.

-----

Let's look at NON-Trusted-OSs first, because most people don't need a Trusted OS:

OpenBSD lacks an uninterceptable audit trail and access control lists as required by TCSEC C2. It distinguishes between world and root privileges.

VMS has an audit trail, access control lists, and a privilege model.

AS/400s have an audit trail, access control lists, a privilege model, an object-based security model with type enforcement and hardware-supported pointer-in-memory-protection because of the single level storage address space, but that does not matter much (think about it as something which is similar to protect-mode on an x86, but based on objects and pointer to objects instead of segments and segment descriptors).

VMS is clearly superior to OpenBSD, mainly because of the privilege model. If a process does not have many privileges, then an attacker can't gain many privileges by hacking it. Simple, isn't it?

An AS/400 is (VMS users listen carefully) clearly superior to both, OpenBSD and VMS. It has a superset of the security features of VMS, and additionally it has object-based protection. Therefore, you can't write to a program object, and you can't execute a data file or things like that.

Now let's look at Trusted OSs:

SE-VMS has an audit trail, access control lists, a privilege model, information labeling and compartment mode.

Solaris with Argus Pitbull has an audit trail, access control lists, fine grained privilege controls plus inheritance rules (proxy privilege sets and so on), a trusted computing base, information labeling and compartment mode (mandatory access controls).

Both are clearly superior to the non-trusted OSs mentioned above, because applications can be totally separated from each other by putting them in separate compartments.
If someone hacks into an application in compartment A, then he/she still can't access an application in compartment B, so he/she is locked down into a jail.

Solaris with Pitbull is clearly superior to VMS, because of the much more sophisticated privilege model. It's more fine-grained and it has inheritance controls, so certain applications will only gain their privileges if they can inherit those privileges from another process. By default, executing another application always drops all privileges.

-----

What I'd like to say is .. 2 things:

1. What about "OpenBSD is the world's most secure OS"? It has a pretty good verified kernel, but it's security mechanisms are simply not powerful enough. A bug-free kernel does not help alot, when you have to run things as root, because the kernel does not have appropriate security mechanisms like privilege controls or compartment mode...

2. What about "Unix can't be secure"? I get really bored by VMS users comparing Standard-Linux with VMS; maybe compare the most secure setup of either Operating System and then let's talk about security again.
HERE is TCSEC B3 certified Unix (Linux-compatible, too).

regards,
octogen

I think you're advocating for Government to license under BSD, which makes sense to me. Your last sentence made it a little unclear.

I think it makes sense for the Feds to use a BSD license for original software creations, as one of their goals is to allow businesses to profit from the research. This is so much better than selling the research to one corporation because it allows the public-at-large the same rights to their software. If one of the citizenry runs with the project, and turns it into something new, and GPLs it, all the better. Then the corps can decide whether they want to use the better GPLd version or the worse one under the BSD.

What doesn't make sense? This has been discussed to death the last couple of days. The BSDL is a better fit, given the Feds' stated interests in preserving business and public exploitations of funded research.

What would be nice is to see more government projects start from a GPL software base, like the still-very-much-alive-and-well SELinux project. I wish this had more support from the community, as right now it's only the wizards that are touching it. If more people got sucked into it, they probably would, in typical Linux fashion, start making it more accessible to the power user with less than several days to devote to moving over his existing setup to an SELinux box. The curve right now is pretty steep.

I got side-tracked. My point was that if more government projects started from a GPL base, then all the work they did on top of it would automatically be available to us, and Mr. Smith's parent corporation wouldn't be involved at that point.

BSDL for new work, GPL for modifying existing projects. The public benefits most.

So when the NSA (a government agency, I think) contributed to a well known GPL project, they were breaking the law or something?

You say they were "disallowed". How so? Is it that you can trust these sneaky spooks to obey the laws of their own country?

Or maybe the new breed of Software Lobbyist was upset that the government could start to shut off the dollar faucet by pursuing cheaper economic models for creating computer programs?

So when the NSA (a government agency, I think) contributed to a well known GPL project, they were breaking the law or something?

You say they were "disallowed". How so? Is it that you can trust these sneaky spooks to obey the laws of their own country?

Or maybe the new breed of Software Lobbyist was upset that the government could start to shut off the dollar faucet by pursuing cheaper economic models for creating computer programs?

License for Security-Enhanced Linux

This is just another approach that Microsoft is taking to lobby against government adoption of Linux. Think about it: if the government isn't allowed to hack on Linux's GPL'd source code, then all of the advantages of free software are instantly nullified.

Many will argue that common sense dictates that the government should only write BSD'd code, but this will inevitably lead to the end of projects like the NSA's selinux. This is one case where even those who don't agree with the GPL ought to stand up and fight for it.

I mean, really, what was the last 'innovation' that occured in the *nix /world?

Jeez... are you serious? Come on, Unix is one of the more important platforms for research, if not the most important. It is flexible, it is reliable, most of the scientific community is familiar with it. And these days it is also free!

Just talking about Linux I could point you to Berlin, some guys with rather interesting ideas for building user interfaces. Or the Beowulf Project, for massive distributed computing. Or RTLinux (and KURT), for full featured real-time operating systems. How about ReiserFS, that takes database-like balanced trees to the filesystem level. Or SELinux, a research prototype of a high-security operating system.

And the list goes on and on (forgive me for not looking up links, go Google for these ones): SPIN (a dynamically extensible operating system written in Modula-3, runs on Linux), all the research stuff at Mosix (including distributed shared memory, grid management, network RAM and more), the Hello Project (an operating system in Standard ML atop Linux), all the emulation stuff which hardly needs to be introduced, and all the kernel work for supporting different processor architectures.

Also note BDS's Kame Project, an advanced implementation of IPV6 and IPSec; the evolutionary scheduler for Linux; the networking kernel stuff, including the QoS work; OpenBIOS; the User-mode Linux kernel. Look up also the "C10K problem" for an interesting paper on server performance, (and while you're on that, khttpd and TUX kernel webservers).

Unix gave you the Internet, for root's sake. How much more "innovative" does it needs to get?

I'm not aware of exactly what NSA stuff you are speaking of.

I suspect he's referring to SELinux, the NSA's "Security Enhanced Linux", which is basically a set of patches (libre) to add ACL support to a Linux kernel and a few select utilities. SELinux is basically just evidence that the NSA has its share of geeks excited by all this free/libre/open-source stuff too.

From the FAQ:

20. Are there any export controls on it?

There are no additional export controls for Security-enhanced Linux over any other version of Linux.

In answer to the original question, I think that the main difference is that SELinux is building the access controls into various syscalls, while this new OpenBSD feature is putting a wrapper around syscalls in general. The overall effect should be fairly similar, but there may be tradeoffs on either side. But don't quote me on that.

That's kind of funny, I was reading their distribution's web site news (which goes back to Dec. 2000), and I didn't see any mention of that, though I did see mention of work being done on integrating with Linux 2.5, posted in late August. How odd, no one must have told them that the project ended, according to your comment.

The NSA has nothing to do with checking security at laboratories and they certainly aren't a software development shop.

They have a lot to do with checking security on software, though, and for not being a software development shop, develop a lot of software. Of course, you don't have to take our word for it, you can just visit SELinux

So the question is, why don't you use the secure medium in the first place?

Because I only get to see my brother once a year in Cuba. And he has a problem carrying back CD-Rs of random pad material through customs.

verify your PGP (or GPG if you please) fingerprint (assuming you're not being wiretapped as well),

Passive evesdropping (aka wiretapping) does not interefere while verifing a public key fingerprint. So you can verify fingerprints of a public key in a public place.

OTP has other problems, beyond the typical key distribution problem. If a non-random source is used for generating the key material, or if the key pad is accidential reused, then trouble stikes, like it did with Venoma.

OTP also lacks message integerity, so if an attack could cut and paste blocks of encrypted ciphertext, Bob would not be able to detect the altered message if the decrypted text make sense (deposit $1000 to account #1233335632 rather than the modified message of deposit $4950292.95 to #1233335632)

encryptions based on elliptic integrals (which by theorem can't be solved analytically, but I suppose there could be approximations).

Now what methods are you referring to here? Elliptic Curve Cryptography normally is used as a faster version of the Discrete Logarithm Problem (DLP) where it is faster and easier to Exponentiate (x^y) than it is to calculate its discrete logarithm (x such that g^x = h) which is the inverse operation and is much harder to calculate.

So I would be interested in this method of using elliptic integrals.

Quantum computing changes the games of cryptography, but it does not end the struggle of cryptographer vs. cryptanalysis. AES when used with a 256-bit key is expected to withstand a bruce force key search using quantum computing within the near future (less than 10-20 years). Of course quantum computing being a young field there is a chance that a radical discovery may ruin our present best estimates for future capabilitities.

With Redhat 7.x, Redhat began to ship with most default package configerations "secure by default".
Maybe it is time for all the distributions to consider shipping with external services such as Apache configured to run under chroot.
Eventualy dedicated servers will require a LSM/SE Linux type enviroment to run exposed services.

If downloaders are freeloaders, doesn't that make Mandrake a freeloader, too? After all, they do have LOTS of open source software. They even built upon another distro themselves. Plus, its not really ethical to force people to lie (click here if you're a member) is it? Especially when they're obligated by the GPL to offer the software for free, and they've got lots of nonprofit orgs providing them with free mirrors.

No, Mandrake is not a freeloader. The people at MandrakeSoft have created all-new software (most notably the Mandrake Installer) and have written a good chunk of code. They have worked to create an entirely new product which, while based on the products of others, does contain the fruit of their labour.

The labour was not provided without cost. In the article, two points are clearly made: 1) there are a substantial number of developers working daily at MandrakeSoft and 2) the result of these costs is that MandrakeSoft is not profitable, i.e. they are NOT making money because they are working too hard to make a better product for you who wish to download it for free. The GPL, contrary to your belief, does not preclude charging money for software. In fact, the idea that those who work should not receive any form of compensation is in itself absurd. If you are giving the fruit of your labour out under the GPL and did not want people making money from it, you chose the WRONG license. Perhaps a license such as that used for the Diku MUD code would better suit you.

The little guys of open-source aren't in it for the money. They do it because they like it. I speak as one who uses one of the little distros [gentoo.org] which made it into the top 10 less than a month after it went beta, and which still doesn't make money (and doesn't plan to). And I have contributed a couple of improvements of my own to my disto.

Let's face it. Right now any group producing a Linux distribution is a "little guy" in the Open Source world, with the possible exception of the NSA. And I don't know that any of them are currently profitable entities, though several are corporate entities. It would have been a better deal for all of them to be nonprofit orgs perhaps, and indeed this is the direction, again stated in the article, that Mandrake seems to be going. Of course the problem with this model is it makes it tougher to get the money which has driven all of this. I think you are forgetting there are costs involved no matter what, for servers and bandwidth and people to work on this stuff. This is why these groups who are providing the software you want are trying to find services people will pay money for to fund that work. And don't think just because you are firmly esconsced in some random distro of the month that hasn't figured out it might have a big bill from its provider yet you are not profiting from this work. People all over on different distros, including lots of coders working for corporations working often on employers paid time are making improvements to tools you care about as we type. It is good that you contribute code. I applaud that effort. I want to encourage it. But it is unfair for you to discourage people from contributing monetarily, or distros from asking for such contributions. In fact if you one day wish to be employed as a professional coder you will find it is helpful if the company you work for has money to pay you with.

The pursuit of money is a necessary evil in a Capitalist society. Money pays the rent and the electric and the help. Money makes this stuff possible. To deny this is folly. But then this is /. ...

Did anyone bother to check the info? This quote may be old, misquoted (or misinterpreted), or dead wrong.

Dick Schafer is not the deputy director of the NSA. Per one of their press releases over two years ago, Bill Black is the Deputy Director:
http://www.nsa.gov/releases/newddir_071000.html

Also, SELinux was updated on July 3rd. Sounds like a bit of work for a dead project :-)
http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/news.html

Did anyone bother to check the info? This quote may be old, misquoted (or misinterpreted), or dead wrong.

Dick Schafer is not the deputy director of the NSA. Per one of their press releases over two years ago, Bill Black is the Deputy Director:
http://www.nsa.gov/releases/newddir_071000.html

Also, SELinux was updated on July 3rd. Sounds like a bit of work for a dead project :-)
http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/news.html

because it's illegal for the NSA to spy on Americans doesn't mean they don't...