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Comment by mylittlepony | Hacker News Reader

How? By hiring all the mathematicians in the world. I don't see how the size of the company would matter. Also, they are US-based, and have to comply with US cryptography laws. But even if their SSL was unbreakable, the NSA/FBI/etc must have a free pass to Google/Facebook/etc data.

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Must? Why? What evidence do we have to prove this, or even substantiate it?

Here ya go: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/05/google-nsa-secrecy-...

Where does it say that the NSA has open access to Google's data? It says that the NSA most likely collaborated with Google as part of an investigation of the hacking of their Chinese servers.

The burden of proof being so low here on HN on matters like this is alarming.

You don't think this stuff is actually happening? That's cute.

so, no, you have no evidence, just a gut instinct. why did you even link to an article?

Because its actually relevant? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuET0kpHoyM

> By hiring all the mathematicians in the world.

not even a little bit.

> Also, they are US-based, and have to comply with US cryptography laws

unless you're talking about sending encryption software to iran, huh?

>not even a little bit.

Well, a little bit. The NSA is the largest employer of Mathematicians in the world, and excluding Universities, they own that title by a very large margin.

What are all of those elite nerds researching? Cryptography.

Only 3-6% of mathematics PhDs produced in the US are hired to government positions each year, with some large portion of that going to the NSA. While that is a lot (and doesn't include the mathematicians hired straight out of bachelors and masters programs), it's minuscule compared to the total number of mathematicians produced each year world-wide ("not even a little bit"), includes many that don't work on cryptography, and is dwarfed by the external security and cryptography community, both in academia (why on earth would you exclude them?) and in business.

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