This is almost too easy. Remember how governments everywhere are whining about not being able to read our encrypted communications and are demanding a backdoor? “Don’t worry,” they tell us, “we’re the government and we’re experts in this stuff. We know what we’re doing.”
What to make, then, of the Japanese Minister in charge of Cybersecurity who says he has never used a computer and doesn’t know what a USB drive is? To be sure, the Japanese have their own culture where things work differently from what most of us are probably used to but they, too, are flabbergasted and outraged so this doesn’t appear to be a cultural misunderstanding.
It’s easy to make fun of this type of thing and, honestly, the story is probably overblown but it does add another datum the considerable store of data indicating that governments should not be trusted with our secrets. Misuse and abuse is bad enough but the incompetence that even hypersecure government agencies such as the American NSA have demonstrated should stand on its own as an adequate reason to be skeptical of governments’ ability to protect our secrets.