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And not "securities" (i.e., financial instruments), which is what I thought from the headline.

Is there any reason to believe publicly funded IT security R&D is any better? See eg. Palantir.

Probably not. But the article doesn't seem to be about them.

The first step to IT security is physical security.

And when all your physical security tools are electronic the first step to physical security is IT security :)

It generalizes to national security as well.

Also the last step, you can't defend against physical access, the best you can do is make data unreadable to anyone unauthorized.

Since when does the lack of perfect defenses render something indefensible?