It was starting to show. Every year small teams of college students from over a hundred countries convene at the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), the oldest and most prestigious contest of its kind. Two decades ago, American teams from Berkeley, Harvard, and MIT dominated the top ten finalists. These days the winners were Russian, Polish, Chinese, South Korean, and Taiwanese. In 2019 a team from Iran beat Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton, which didn’t even break into the top twenty. America’s pool of cyber talent was shrinking. U.S. intel agencies had taken a big hit in
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