One thing to be said about the offence vs defence side of this story is that the adage the best defence is a good offence definitively applies here. It's so muc

One thing to be said about the offence vs defence side of this story is that the adage the best defence is a good offence definitively applies here. It's so much easier to attack another system than defend your own. It's inherent to the way systems are set up: A computer system has many services, programs and tasks running on it. Only one of these needs to contain a flaw for a system to be vulnerable, obviously this means that on a secure system everything must be perfect, for 1 flaw compromises everything. Therefore I don't find it strange that the NSA allocates the resources it does to research and expand it's offensive capabilities, since trying to defend the systems of the US is probably a lost cause. The question remains if this is ethical and/or legitimate. Being a non us-citizen I'm certainly opposed to the practises of weakening standards and harvesting/exploiting services on the internet. I also find the double-speak of the US government deplorable, on the one hand we have the government declaring that in many ways a cyber-attack will, and can, be reacted upon as if it were a conventional attack. And on the other hand we have the US government attacking and targeting civilians (Belgacom Sysadmins). I fail to see how attacks against the US can be labelled as a conventional attack, but that attacks from the US against civilians are apparently OK.