I think the national security establishment are applying pre-digital paradigms and thinking to cyberspace and as a result have gotten things almost entirely bac

I think the national security establishment are applying pre-digital paradigms and thinking to cyberspace and as a result have gotten things almost entirely backwards. In the physical real world, "the best defense is a good offense" often has a lot of truth to it as in limited resources situations force concentration to defeat hostile forces can be fundamentally more effective. But when it comes to information which can be infinitely and losslessly copied it might make more sense to think of security in terms of information gradients and societal model. For a liberal democracy/market economy a lot of useful information gets generated, but it can be less effective at utilizing it and more leaky. Whereas (at least in examples so far in human history) centralized command authoritarian societies don't seem to as effectively come up with new stuff, but if offered the chance to take it from elsewhere can act with more of a long term vision (and of course with panopticons and massive restrictions on individual freedoms can more effectively insulate themselves). So maybe from a strategic point of view government security should be working to shore up the weaknesses of the societal model while maximizing the strengths, the best strategy for each model are opposites. So for the USA, I think it'd be better if nobody had any ability to hack anything and the government acted aggressively to maintain an unequal information gradient. Then the problems that come from short term incentives, less decisive/unified responses, and so on continue to get made up for by a major technological edge. Whereas for a polity like China in a world where information is smoothed out they can leverage their authoritarian governance for more advantage. Which means the NSA has been doing the opposite of what they should, because for America in the digital domain "the best offense is a good defense". America has the most to lose from having all of its information generation/infrastructure (R&D, networking/governing systems etc) get taken and/or disrupted. Rather then thinking of digital security issues as weapons to be exploited against less technologically advanced enemies who by definition have far less to lose, they should have long since been thinking of them as big strategic risks and working to eliminate all of them as aggressively as possible, and to be a dependable source for best practices in general. I think maybe there is a basic mindset mixup in the leadership given the last 50 years and their military backgrounds, and that's really caused America to squander enormous amounts of strategic value (and goodwill as well for that matter). Very foolish and unfortunate, and I'm not sure if anyone in government is currently thinking about reworking the NSA into a role focused on actual national security.