[ExI] he said what????

[Adrian Tymes]

On Fri, Dec 30, 2016 at 10:01 PM, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
> But why couldn't NIST sign it?

That's a confusion between "could" and "does".

NIST isn't about crypto or the like; it's about standards, such as
standard time.  It is in this capacity that NASDAQ uses them.  NASDAQ
itself does the signing, and only uses what it claims NIST said the
time was at the time.  NASDAQ itself is the ultimately trusted entity;
NIST is little more than error correction in this case.

NIST could, in theory, add crypto and public signing and all of that.
It would be outside of NIST's current mission - there would be no
obvious reason why NIST should be more trusted to do this or is
inherently more capable of it than certain other parts.  For that
reason, they are unlikely to be able to justify adding this to their
budget - and with government, if you don't have the budget to do it,
it doesn't get done.  So they will not do this in practice, even
though in theory they could.