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Comment by youknownothing | Hacker News Reader

Just to throw in a couple of possibly outlandish theories:

1. as others have said, they could be collecting the encrypted messages and then tried to decrypt them using quantum computing, the Chinese have been reportedly trying to do this for many years now.

2. with metadata and all the information from other sources, they could infer what the conversation is about without the need to decrypt it: if I visit a page (Facebook cookies, they know), then I share a message to my friend John, and then John visits the same page (again, cookies), then they can be pretty certain that the contain of the message was me sharing the link.

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(1) made me chuckle. I've worked at nearly every FAANG including Meta. These companies aren't nearly as advanced or competent as you think.

I no longer work at Meta, but in my mind a more likely scenario than (1) is: a senior engineer proposes a 'Decryption at Scale' framework solely to secure their E6 promo, and writes a 40-page Google Doc to farm 'direction' points for PSC. Five PMs repost this on Workplace to celebrate the "alignment" so they can also include it in their PSCs.

The TL and PMs immediately abandon the project after ratings are locked because they already farmed the credit for it. The actual implementation gets assigned to an E4 bootcamp grad who is told by a non-technical EM to pivot 3 months in because it doesn't look like 'measurable impact' in a perf packet. The E4 gets fired to fill the layoff quota and everyone else sails off into the sunset.

real

2) enough metadata can reveal a person's life, habits, and location which removes the need to analyze the actual bulky content of communications.

can analyze receivers data or receivers contact trees data which is easier to access.

The number of free or paid data sources is daunting.

Re. quantum computing: no chance, the scientific and engineering breakthroughs they would need are too outlandish, like claiming China already had a 2026-level frontier model back in 2016.

I think this is the most likely scenario. The US government is not necessarily trying to read the messages right now, in real-time. But it wants to read the messages at some point in the future.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

It's the backups. The backups aren't encrypted such that only the end-user has the key.

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