Comment by cmyr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmyr | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not sure if this would be true. It's a game theory problem, surely. I'm not especially crypto-literate, but if player A has the ability to read the majority of currently encrypted comms world-wide, broadcasting that ability (by suddenly and dramatically changing their own encryption methodologies) would be a very silly move unless there was a very serious reason to believe somebody else was very close to developing the same abilities... and if they were, then they would also be changing their own encryption standards, which we haven't seen.

So it basically comes down to whether or not we 'assume our enemies are advancing their own tech at roughly the same rate.' The NSA probably has an okay idea of what 'roughly' is, and if you had this ability you wouldn't be showing your hand lightly.

Way more speculatively, I'd be curious to know whether or not it would be possible to add 'next-gen' crypto to existing practices in such a way that it might be transparent?

I also think that since this would be exploited against non-state actors as well as states changes the payouts calculations significantly. Much, if not most, of the value is derived from exploiting non-state actors (i.e. Al Qaeda) who almost certainly would not have this capability or would not be able to keep it quite if they did. By signaling to the state actor on these capabilities, they would be giving up the value of exploiting the information from the non-state actors. So, even if you believed that state actors had these capabilities, it may be better to be kept a secret between the two countries and allow low priority secrets to be exploited than to have the info publicly known and the capability lost.

There is very good reason to believe that once you have developed something someone else is close too. The reason is you found it.

If you check some scientific breakthroughs during the Cold War they were very close on the both sides in the matter of months.

Also with 5% of the world population NSA have limited talent pool. Assuming you are first to the goal in that case is ... overly confident. (Even if we correct for a lot of people that are not easy to tap in the outside populations chances are not on the NSA side). And I am sure a lot of the messages in other countries communications are fake and testing just to see if someone is snooping.

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