Not really ironic or related. The privacy here is, well, keeping the tools entirely private -- no distribution or highly limited distribution, not obscuring the

Not really ironic or related. The privacy here is, well, keeping the tools entirely private -- no distribution or highly limited distribution, not obscuring their function. Irony would be applying obfuscation or other DRM protection techniques to tools intended to de-obfuscate/reverse engineer which are then distributed/sold. This is fairly common in commercial reverse engineering solutions, although I don't think the irony of the cat and mouse game is lost on the authors in that case...