[cryptography] [info] The NSA Is Building the Countrybs Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)

[Jeffrey I. Schiller]

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Let's think this through a bit. Assuming no stupendous breakthrough,
breaking encrypted messages will always take a significant amount of
time (and depending on the amount of "stuff" you have to deal with, 1
or 2 seconds might be significant!).

So I see really only two purposes for such a massive data center, and
I suspect both are addressed.

1) Use best available (to the NSA) techniques for breaking selected
   encrypted messages. Presumably these would be those from foreign
   governments and from suspected terrorists etc. But this will always
   be a limited number of messages.

2) Traffic analysis, including plain text analysis of unencrypted
   communications. Sure, there is a lot of encrypted stuff out
   there. But there is also a ton of unencrypted stuff, or stuff where
   you can easily get access to the unencrypted version (aka financial
   transactions etc.). And even of the encrypted traffic, a lot can be
   discarded as boring (aka say all of the https traffic to
   amazon.com).

I bet everyone on this list can send encrypted messages to each other
and they will never be broken... because they probably already know
who we all are and (at least I hope) have put us all in the "mostly
harmless" bucket.

                        -Jeff

_______________________________________________________________________
Jeffrey I. Schiller
MIT Technologist, Consultant, and Cavy Breeder
Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
617.910.0259 - Voice
jis at qyv.net
http://jis.qyv.name
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