Remember that airgapped, inside a Faraday cage computer deep in the vault in Mission Impossible where that analyst was typing a report? They really have those buried away for the Uber Top Secret, don't give this to Russia/China stuff.
So, if even the spy agencies don't trust anything here at home, you think they might know something we don't. Trust nothing, it's all already compromised, seriously.
You have programs executing code compiled by other programs on top of programs booted by special programs embedded in hardware chips built with circuits as small as atoms. You can barely detect unauthorised operations at the very top layers (and at huge cost in terms of effort), everything underneath the OS is basically a black box for all intents and purposes... and you can't trust a black box.
from http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-bottom-line-is-encrypti...
Schneier addressed this in his recent Stanford lecture on the NSA and Internet security. Long, > 1 hour, but very much worth viewing.
However, I doubt it. There are plenty of clever mathematicians not working for the NSA...
Instead I believe they mostly focus on methods to find flaws in implementations of encryption schemes, possibly with the help of some theoretical breakthroughs and formal automated reasoning, because it is so much easier. Even the people working at NSA are lazy ;-)
If everything was broken, then why did they go through so uch trouble in the lavabit case?
But I personally don't see much of a (self-determination-ful) way forward other than making the assumption that some public key crypto works (ie one way functions exist), and building secure systems based on it.
Not just soldiers, witness the Coventry Blitz.
> However, Winterbotham's claim has been rejected by other Ultra participants and by historians. They state that while Churchill was indeed aware that a major bombing raid would take place, no one knew what the target would be.[3][4]
> Peter Calvocoressi was head of the Air Section at Bletchley Park, which translated and analysed all deciphered Luftwaffe messages. He wrote "Ultra never mentioned Coventry... Churchill, so far from pondering whether to save Coventry or safeguard Ultra, was under the impression that the raid was to be on London."[5]
> Scientist R. V. Jones, who led the British side in the Battle of the Beams, wrote that "Enigma signals to the X-beam stations were not broken in time," and that he was unaware that Coventry was the intended target. Furthermore, a technical mistake caused jamming countermeasures to be ineffective. Jones also noted that Churchill returned to London that afternoon, which indicated that Churchill believed that London was the likely target for the raid.[6]
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coventry_Blitz#Coventry_and_Ul...
References:
1. Winterbotham, F. W. The Ultra Secret, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974 ISBN 0-297-76832-8; also London, Futura, 1975, ISBN 0-86007-268-1
2. Ray, John, "The Night Blitz", Cassel & Co 1996, ISBN 0-304-35676-X p. 155
3. "Defending Coventry" (http://www.historiccoventry.co.uk/blitz/defend-cov.php). Historic Coventry.
4. Hunt, David (28 August 1976), "The raid on Coventry", The Times: 11
5. Calvocoressi, Peter (1981). Top Secret Ultra. New York: Ballantine Books. pp. 85–86. ISBN 0-345-30069-6.
6. Jones, R. V. (1978). Most Secret War: British Scientific Intelligence 1939–1945. London: Hamilton. p. 149. ISBN 0-241-89746-7. This book was also published in the US under the title The Wizard War.
The British were paranoid about this; if they wanted to attack a tactical target where the Germans would think "there's no way they could have known about this, our codes must be broken", they'd always send a decoy scout or something out first to "accidentally come across" the secret target.
The Americans did similar things; when Adm. Yamamoto was shot down, his flight was duly "detected" by a reconnaissance plane first, even though the Americans knew full well when it was taking off and where it was going.
The relentless legal troubles of the lavabit case closely mimic the troubles of Joseph Nacchio (who refused NSA wiretapping while he was CEO of Qwest) [0]
Korea, Japan, Russia, China, India and Brazil will all be spending tons more on encryption. The most fatal flaw in all of this is that I expect they will have their own secure protocols in the next couple decades and what's really ironic, our former "enemies" may do a better job.