The big project is decryption. There is a race to be the first country/agency to be able to decrypt data protected by pre-quantum encryption schemes. It is a very narrow use case but there are very deep pockets funding the race.
As far as i can see there is quite a lot of "quantum safe" encryption so what kind of historical data exists lying around with lots of value?
In my opinion if breaking AES is to serve military (and hunt for secrets) then it would be done in secret.
I assume all the big nations spy on each other. Have a very good idea on the broad strokes total number of personnel, planes, ships, bombs, and where they are all located. Potential for novel military insight seems low.
There is probably lots of stupid human gossip to be found: mistresses, politically embarrassing failures, self-dealing schemes, etc. Maybe there are a few tantalizing useful nuggets: attached are the full schematics for the planetary weather control machine, where we buried that crashed ufo, location of the archive holding all the kompromat, etc.
I have no doubt intelligence agencies would decrypt anything and everything, but it seems more like they would just because vs perceived need.
I find this statement funny, not at your expense.
In public discourse, speak about quantum encryption too early – such as within the last five years – and the common opinion on say Stack Overflow/HN/Reddit/among the outer circles of cybersecurity is "don't model a threat before you get there".
Now apparently there is a lot of quantum-safe encryption - not true, NIST barely came to a standard in the last year, which failed quickly, even though there are quantum-resistant strategies which have gained tentative adoption in companies like Signal and MullvadVPN. But interesting that this is a perception someone has now, and suddenly quantum computers are being put under popular scrutiny again, perhaps driven by advancements in inner circles and higher tiers of tech.
It's tiresome to see these discourses out of sync
Symmetric encryption is safer, but you still need to double the key lengths at least.
Think of it as a control plane vs. data plane, where you have the state as a control plane, and if data can escape its purview, or worse the data plane can generate control messages that subvert it - you get existential uncertainty and risk. It will never let itself be reduced to a dumb pipe. Encryption represents a limit on the absolute sovereignty of that control plane, so the resources to contain it are a constant need.