A group that performs an actual attack, hands the result to a nation state adversary, and doesn&#x27;t publish the results either before or after (except in the abstract of a withdrawn talk) is hardly the &quot;loyal opposition&quot;.<p>edit: Academics are not Obama&#x27;s proverbial JV team.  One should expect them to be as smart as those working for internal agencies, if somewhat less focused on attacking real-world systems.  It seems that in this case, the only difference is that they&#x27;re somewhat worse at keeping secrets, but given that the talk was withdrawn, it&#x27;s not that they didn&#x27;t try.  So I don&#x27;t see the grounds for the implicit suggestion in the quoted tweets that they aren&#x27;t &#x27;real&#x27; adversaries.