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Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

Just to clarify: are you saying with your point #2 that the government can break any encryption currently in wide use with 802.11 networks and all popular VPN solutions? Or are you just saying that they can physically listen to encrypted transmissions? I was under the impression that encryption scales in complexity pretty much infinitely, so long as you don't care about encryption/decryption speeds.

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I had a relative that once worked in "government security" for the U.S. government. What that meant, we weren't permitted to know. Personally, I think he was full of crap and here's why: in his Professional Opinion, any encryption algorithm implemented in software was doomed to failure because "it could be hacked" - he was completely unaware that any hardware circuit can be emulated in software.

Point: it tends to be these very gov't lackeys that think just because the signal is in the air that it can be intercepted, decoded, decrypted and its plaintext content recorded.

I'm saying that any government (possibly not some of the more representative governments, but certainly many of the more oppressive ones) could outlaw for unlicensed RF transmitters any encryption they are incapable of breaking.

As to what NSA, et al are currently capable of, I honestly have no idea, but I'm willing to bet some of their capabilities would be surprising (in both directions, depending on which specific capability you were to look at).

This isn't what the parent was saying, but you are correct: the NSA can't break properly implemented strong encryption. They can't perform miracles; they used the same technology the rest of us use, just on a different scale.

Fifteen years ago we had proof of this after the government inadvertently showed its cards via clipper chip, the crusade against PGP, etc. We still have export controls on strong encryption, and there's a good reason for that (well, maybe not a good reason).

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