During the last decades of the Cold War, The US and the USSR eschewed direct conflict with its attendant nuclear risks for high stakes technological espionage. In the 1970's, the White House began to craft policy to counter Soviet interception of domestic telecommunications in secret. Over the course of the next twenty years until the fall of the Berlin Wall, the US Government cooperated with its industrial partners to protect US telecommunications networks. The US government built security into US telecommunications networks in even as it was deregulating the US domestic market. Following 9/11, US counterterrorism efforts focused on intelligence and information security. The White House called upon the dual use technologies and policies developed for use against the USSR and appropriated them for use against Al Qaida and other terrorist organizations, in some cases by the selfsame actors. The results are decidedly mixed with both dramatic successes and failures. At the same time, the public has become alarmed by some of the surveillance aspects of these technologies. This research draws attention to the distinct continuity of US telecommunications security policy irrespective of the the threat and questions the applicability of methods and technologies developed for use against a superpower to the threat posed by loose networks.