> ... the key (or password) is kept obscure... I often think about this, and the conclusion I've come to is secret != obscure. Obscurity describes information

> ... the key (or password) is kept obscure... I often think about this, and the conclusion I've come to is secret != obscure. Obscurity describes information you do not know but can research to determine; secret describes information you do not know but and must guess. But I agree that the argument that the NSA probably uses obscurity (I speculate to make messages harder to attribution to them and not to protect the secrecy of the content) isn't very moving.