On Sword and Shield in the Political arena.

I have thought about the sword and shield discussion and decided that to encapsulate the meaning of best practice it is necessary to understand an intellectual Charleston, that is part of the Cotillion of a formal education. For this illustration we will contemplate the programming student who comes to the (parallelizable) problem of Factorization. (The prototypical example of a sequential process that CANNOT be parallelized is "Sorting.") The process I am about to illustrate has been formalized by the philosopher mathematician Polya and could profitably be redundantly linked as Polya's method in Wiki. The first move of the programming student is to check all possible factors up to half the number to be factored, because the first factor is 2. The first optimization of this process, is to observe that as this first factor is the only non-odd possibility, the student need only check odd numbers up to half the number being factored. From there, there remain two more optimizations; check only primes, and check only up to the square root. In microcosm this illustrates a problem faced by the entire intelligence community. How so? Every four years the population of every University in the country is refurbished with all new ingenues. In every case these new students do the same dances in pursuit of conquering the same cotillion. Intelligence people likewise must master a cotillion of their own. The question is one of how their population is refurbished. I'll call CIA, NSA and FBI the big three of this imagined oligarchy. CIA has sword applications at heart; NSA has shield applications at heart and FBI is "Black and White," to use the old Chess allusion. Overseas CIA begins to engage politically in bringing about new freedoms to a foreign country. In their security procedures they are tested in a Darwinian sink or swim contest where their population is lucky to be executed on failure, rather than tortured at length. In either case, their ranks are thinned accordingly and subject to refurbishment. FBI is not subject to the same stringent requirements of failure, but individuals must from time to time acquaint themselves with security procedures too. FBI benefits from their ranks suffering less turnover than most - a Special Agent for the FBI is very hard to fire. The NSA inhabits a more volatile political environment. To them "all" sword applications must be considered against a measuring stick of National Security Interests. I estimate that as individuals at NSA successfully complete their intelligence Charleston, they may become subject to the accusation of "Change Agents." This is bad enough in the legislative arena of liberal politics, but when all actors who do not pigeon-hole correctly are regarded as threats, the NSA population may be subject to refurbishment by firing the most competent among them in a vicious circle. It has seriously hurt my impression of NSA competence.