I am reminded of a reception at the HPC User Forum back around 2002. There were a number of people in the room from various national labs and intelligence agen

I am reminded of a reception at the HPC User Forum back around 2002. There were a number of people in the room from various national labs and intelligence agencies. I was part of the firm that organized and hosted these meetings. I overhear a guy from NSA kidding a guy from Lawrence Livermore Labs with the following line. "At least I don't design weapons of mass destruction, all I do is read emails" In truth neither one of these guys did the activities stated, both really were doing system design, optimization and resource allocation with super computers so that the intelligence analysts could rapidly search billions of emails for trigger words, cryptographers could break encryption or weapons designers could model the characteristics of nuclear weapons since we were in a weapons testing ban. But to echo your point the amount of resources available at national labs and intelligence agencies. The supercomputing resources they had available dwarfed anything available in industry or academia at the time. Today, one might argue that industry and in particular places like Google and Facebook have computing infrastructure and support that was previously only available at national labs. So now the Google or Facebook guy in a similar meeting will be saying "I only do the analytics that enable us to target people with ads and messages to which they are most vulnerable."