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Comment by mtct | Hacker News Reader

This is a good start, but in the end the NSA can bypass any of these measure if needed (even the cryptography). The only think that really can change this situation is a protest versus your political representatives.

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You think NSA has a way to break AES/RSA?

https://sslimgs.xkcd.com/comics/security.png

I don't think that scales very well...

Alas, the NSA can afford a million dollar cluster to crack your password...

A million dollar cluster won't make a dent in cracking an AES key of a proper size. Not unless the NSA have managed to solve some pretty baffling math problems and keep it secret.

The NSA is currently the largest employer of mathematicians in the US. To think they haven't found anything of use would be naive at best. http://www.nsa.gov/research/tech_transfer/advanced_math/

AES is a specification of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). USA use it to encrypt the most sensitive informations. It's hard to think that they would use a broken cryptographyc algorithm themselves

All the computers in the world wouldn't be able to brute force AES with a strong key in less than 10 quadrillion years [1]. They would be better off spending millions in four-leaf clovers and faceroll the password.

That said if they knew a way to crack AES or RSA it would be a different story (a nightmare).

[1] http://blog.agilebits.com/2013/03/09/guess-why-were-moving-t...

the common xkcd-answer when it comes to cryptography.. http://xkcd.com/538/

It simply does not need to scale very well to scare the few people which understand crypto and plausible deniability.

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