I can't imagine why an agency of the US government whose sole purpose is breaking other parties' security (cryptographically or otherwise) would release to the public a mechanism with which to increase the level of security on an individuals computer to a non-trivial level.

Well, I can't either, but since the agency you describe is not the NSA, I'm willing to assume (subject to verification by those who are better kernel hackers than I) that it is in fact what it claims to be.

While I can't comment on the way their budget is divided internally between departments (and neither can anyone else who's not on one of the Select Committees on Intelligence*), NSA's ostensible principal task is assuring the security of U.S. Government communications. As such, they do, in fact, have a vested interest in producing computer products that are hard to compromise. And since government computers do communicate with other computers, NSA also has a vested interest in improving overall computer security (public-interest issues like internet worms aside).

Note that this would not be inconsistent with the allegations related to their using overseas portions of Echelon system to monitor U.S. communications: other than at a broad public-interest level (countering corporate espionage, for instance), they don't have a vested interest in improving the security of civilian communications, and you are unlikely to see them release a communications encryption scheme any time soon (see also "Clipper Chip").

Oh, and frankly, dollars don't compare nearly as well to Donuts as they used to ;-)

*This is a separate, and serious, concern, which I don't intend to go into at the moment.

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If God had meant us to fly, he would *never* have given us the railroads.
    --Michael Flanders

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