And they wonder why it's so hard...

It's a dreary day in Georgetown, with rain lashing at the windows of the Marriott Conference Center...The air is dense with geekspeak spiced with a dash of federalese. There's talk about encryption and nonrepudiation, digital signatures and biometrics, and more acronyms than you'll find in a bowl of alphabet soup: PKI, VPN, CHAP, TACACS. All this for the DOD and the DOJ, the FAA and the OMB!

During the break, I do what you're supposed to do at conferences: I mingle. Seeing me approach, Philip, a curly-haired guy in the back row, looks anxious. I ask him where he works. He looks at my notepad and considers bolting for the door. "I, uh, am a contractor for the INS," he says reluctantly. "Cool!" I say. "What do you do?" Panic creeps into his voice, as if an image of his credentials being shredded flashes before his eyes. "Uh, I work with biometric [censored], encrypting [censored] for [censored]," he replies. "But you can't use that."

There's a guy in a striped sweater and glasses in the front row who looks brave. I lean over. "Hi!" I say, trying not to sound like I'm grilling an Al Qaeda operative. "What are you working on?" He looks at me as if I've just asked for the PIN to his Cayman Islands bank account. "Army. Comanche helicopters. It's classified."

Read the whole thing here.
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