31–40 of 122 posts
I wonder why do newspapers insist on labelling Snowden a 'leaker'. Why not 'whistleblower', or 'privacy advocate'?
Other interesting discussions about language usage on the AP blog - http://blog.ap.org/
I think observers have long assumed NSA is some number of years ahead – say, 2-30 years ahead – of openly published results in cryptanalysis and cryptosystem vulnerabilities.
But it's really hard to assume that - that's assuming true mathematical leaps and invention. Admittedly if you put enough cryptographers on the payroll they may form their own university, but they still need the air of their peers on the outside. Imagine a cosmologist today transported 30 years back and asked to attend conferences - they would gain no inspiration. I think we put too much emphasis on the single data p…
What if the "groundbreaking" crypto-cracking was that the NSA discovered you could trick people into cracking "bountied" SHA-256 hashes in a massively parallel operation?
:( up until just a few years ago, I always looked at the NSA organization with a sense of awe and pride ... that we (the US) were so advanced. Now it's just a source of shame that such powerful knowledge is being directed at us, rather than used as a tool for our benefit.
I think observers have long assumed NSA is some number of years ahead – say, 2-30 years ahead – of openly published results in cryptanalysis and cryptosystem vulnerabilities.
I wonder why do newspapers insist on labelling Snowden a 'leaker'. Why not 'whistleblower', or 'privacy advocate'?
What if the "groundbreaking" crypto-cracking was that the NSA discovered you could trick people into cracking "bountied" SHA-256 hashes in a massively parallel operation?
> The Post said it withheld the rest, and kept some information out of its reporting, in consultation with the Obama administration to protect U.S. intelligence sources and methods. Weird. Why now? They (admin) refused to do that with WikiLeaks.
I think observers have long assumed NSA is some number of years ahead – say, 2-30 years ahead – of openly published results in cryptanalysis and cryptosystem vulnerabilities.
But it's really hard to assume that - that's assuming true mathematical leaps and invention. Admittedly if you put enough cryptographers on the payroll they may form their own university, but they still need the air of their peers on the outside. Imagine a cosmologist today transported 30 years back and asked to attend conferences - they would gain no inspiration. I think we put too much emphasis on the single data p…
It's common for people to suggest that the NSA is 20 years ahead of the private sector, but it's not clear how true this is. That number is commonly cited as a result of changes the NSA made to DES, which later suggested (and Don Coppersmith openly confirmed) they knew about differential cryptanalysis 20 years before Shamir published anything about it.
However, that was long before cryptography became as popular a research topic outside of government circles. There are now many other places to go to do that type of research, and based on the public payscale data available, almost all of them pay better than the NSA. Recent developments, such as their Dual Counter Mode proposal in 2001, suggest that they might not be as far ahead as they once were.