We don’t want alarm our transatlantic cousins unnecessarily, but the news that Sun Microsystems has won a big contract for its workstations from a US agency so secret that none dare speak its name (CI No 716) raises a worrying thought: everyone is airily assuming that the customer is the hush-hush National Security Agency, yet although the NSA pretends to be secret, you don’t have to be Ms Amy Carter to know that it sits there cosily in Langley, Virginia, Admiral Bobby Inman was top honcho there at one time, and even that it is spending $960m on Unix systems with AT&T… isn’t it a little worrying that we seem to know so much about an agency that is meant to be top secret? Isn’t it possible that the NSA is nothing but a front to draw fire away from the really secret agency? (Exeunt amid muffled cries, off, of recall Oliver North, Fawn Hall, Sun Microsystems to the stand).
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