Hacker News Reader

Not just the surveillance. The other fear is that an adversary can just shut out countries at a whim.

Of course, it's easier to just change a policy at an endpoint you control, rather than cutting up undersea cables and shooting down satellites.

"Oh, a fishing trawler has cut your country's internet access ? Tzz, tzz, tzz, those sub-par american cables ... No worry, you can buy ours that happens to be much sturdier and at the low, low price of whatever you paid before the cable was cut".

An idea is that nations are storing the encrypted packets now to decrypt them once they have access to a number of sufficiently fast quantum computers (store/harvest now decrypt later). This assumes the data will still be useful in the future.

Preposterous. You would need massive data centers to do that…

https://i.stuff.co.nz/business/131661727/government-has-been...

If there is a war, whoever owns the cables could control what traffic flows through them. DNS queries are plain text.