As a rule of thumb, I don't take any article that refers to Snowden's leaks as "revelations" seriously. The only new information Snowden revealed is that their programs are called PRISM, upstream and xKeyscore; and if a journalist learned the details behind those programs from Snowden -- when they've been going on for at least a decade -- they clearly don't know much about the subject.
The NSA's crypto "breakthrough"
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Re: The NSA's crypto "breakthrough"
#72There's at least two other significant possibilities: 1) There's an attack against RSA which doesn't involve factorization 2) There's an attack against AES / Serpent / Twofish I'd say the second is considerably more likely, firstly because the one NSA quote we have on it is "cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems" - which sounds much more like a new attack like differential cryptanalysis whic…
On point 2, NSA still allows the use of AES-256 to protect top secret data: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_Suite_B_Cryptography
Why is everyone assuming the NSA has to be using their own standards, behind close doors?
Re: The NSA's crypto "breakthrough"
#73Totally tangential, but... I must have seen that exact same photo of NSA headquarters 100 times over the past month, at the head of every blog entry related to it. It is too much to ask the nation's photographers just to take a few more pictures from different angles? ;) It's as bad as as the Onion's opinion on Snowden ("Nation Demands New Photograph Of Edward Snowden"): https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&q=%22Na…
It's really hard to take pictures of the NSA and I wish I was joking. When you drive past it, on say MD's Route 100, there are signs stating not to stop or take pictures and police officers with their lights on at all times on the side of the road. You can't stop here unless it's an emergency. I'm not sure about the laws that back this up but I've never tested them.
In England there's the Official Secrets Act. Signs say something like "a prohibited area as defined by the Official Secrets Act".
There has been some paranoia around photographers taking photographs in public. The London police force had to issue guidelines for their officers about correct procedure. (http://content.met.police.uk/Site/photographyadvice) (http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/new...)
It's probably not a good idea to stand outside GCHQ's fence and take photos. They'll claim it's to protect secrets - the privacy and secrecy of who works for them, for example. (Because there is mostly carpark between the doughnut and the public road). I don't know if someone would get arrested, but "they" would certainly feel able to use their anti-terror powers and the experience would not be pleasant.
Re: The NSA's crypto "breakthrough"
#74As a rule of thumb, I don't take any article that refers to Snowden's leaks as "revelations" seriously. The only new information Snowden revealed is that their programs are called PRISM, upstream and xKeyscore; and if a journalist learned the details behind those programs from Snowden -- when they've been going on for at least a decade -- they clearly don't know much about the subject.
What a ridiculous rule of thumb: Snowden got a lot of closely held information in front of the general public. If that doesn't count as a revelation, your standards are too high.
Re: The NSA's crypto "breakthrough"
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? Because the government doesn't deserve to have any secret programs whatsoever? I've said it before and I'll say it again: Even if leaking XKeyscore and PRISM was morally justified, leaking the intelligence budget or leaking other programs is probably unwise. Remember that when we talk about leaking, we're talking about weakening the American government. We should at least think about the implications.
The American government is collecting as much data about as many humans as it can, which I find morally repugnant. I support efforts to make that more difficult, even if it weakens the American government.
Government strength is relative. Weakening the American government is equivalent to strengthening other Governments. Would you mind telling us which ones you prefer and why they are morally superior?
Re: The NSA's crypto "breakthrough"
#76As a rule of thumb, I don't take any article that refers to Snowden's leaks as "revelations" seriously. The only new information Snowden revealed is that their programs are called PRISM, upstream and xKeyscore; and if a journalist learned the details behind those programs from Snowden -- when they've been going on for at least a decade -- they clearly don't know much about the subject.
What a ridiculous rule of thumb: Snowden got a lot of closely held information in front of the general public. If that doesn't count as a revelation, your standards are too high.
No, he really didn't. We knew that the USA intercepted any Internet traffic they could get their hands on, and we knew that big data companies were in bed with the NSA. If the talking point is that Snowden got these facts on mainstream news, that isn't a revelation, that's marketing. "Relevation" implies the idea didn't exist beforehand.
Re: The NSA's crypto "breakthrough"
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
What a ridiculous rule of thumb: Snowden got a lot of closely held information in front of the general public. If that doesn't count as a revelation, your standards are too high.
No, he really didn't. We knew that the USA intercepted any Internet traffic they could get their hands on, and we knew that big data companies were in bed with the NSA. If the talking point is that Snowden got these facts on mainstream news, that isn't a revelation, that's marketing. "Relevation" implies the idea didn't exist beforehand.
So a revelation isn't the revealing of a secret to people who don't know the secret?
(or to put it another way: revealing a secret to a population where the vast majority do not know it)
Snowden revealed the scale of the operation too, and the depth of the rabbit hole.
Re: The NSA's crypto "breakthrough"
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
The American government is collecting as much data about as many humans as it can, which I find morally repugnant. I support efforts to make that more difficult, even if it weakens the American government.
Government strength is relative. Weakening the American government is equivalent to strengthening other Governments. Would you mind telling us which ones you prefer and why they are morally superior?
Weakening the American government is equivalent to strengthening other Governments.
No, building petabyte-scale data centers to spy on you and me is what's weakening the American government. We're not the problem, right?
The NSA is like the drunk who looks for his lost keys under the lamppost, "because that's where the light is." Not only does the American government's idea of a hypersecure state not make us any more free, there's vanishingly little evidence that it accomplishes its purpose of making us any more secure.
Re: The NSA's crypto "breakthrough"
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Show some gratitude. You have no idea how many individuals had to sacrifice their personal lives to get that picture into the commons.
What do you mean? As far as I can tell, it is freely available on NSA's website: http://www.nsa.gov/about/_images/pg_hi_res/nsa_aerial.jpg
It's just a joke, sorry. I'm well aware humor isn't appreciated around here and actually I understand it because humor is a slippery slope ending in reddit-style banal meme-threads, but every once in a while I can't help myself and karma be damned.
Re: The NSA's crypto "breakthrough"
#80Breaking public-key crypto would have to be the biggest coup in SIGINT in the history of ever . Much bigger than cracking the Enigma. Just thinking about the sheer volume of internet traffic at every level and in every country that relies on the security of encryption makes the possibility of it being fundamentally broken a literal nightmare. I don't think it has happened. But if it had , that would be the kind of se…
Well, it would be a very well guarded secret. But even then the question is how public key crypto is broken. If they can easily generate exploits for implementations, because they know a essential implementation detail everybody else is missing, then it would be fundamentally different from being able to break RSA directly, or if they have a constructive prove of P=NP.
Remember that factoring primes isn't know to be NP Hard. There is no complexity breakthrough required, we just don't know how to do it quickly. So we don't get P=NP from any factoring breakthrough.