The NSA is hinting hard that it has cracked the fiber optic barrier and finds encryption 'no more than speed bump'. As usual, might be true (esp. the parts about tracking phones and tapping undersea fiber), but bring truckload of salt to the party.
Recent Bluessky Posts- My letter to Yale President McInnis about Yale reportedly in talks to 'bend the knee'. Text in the Alt. July 27, 2026 Michael Froomkin
- Yup. I like to remove the middleman, but that usually takes me back to ActBlue.... July 27, 2026 Michael Froomkin
- Four very similar texts in 24 hours claiming to be from Troy Jackson & asking for money. All from different phone numbers, so saying 'stop' to one doesn't stop the others. I don't usually block Dems as spam, even when they are randos far away I wouldn't give to, but I'm going to make an exception. July 26, 2026 Michael Froomkin
- "I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I've written you a long one." -- Mark Twain July 26, 2026 Michael Froomkin
- Interesting example of power of banking regs on international affairs. Banks want govt to protect them from money laundering & assisting terrorism claims. Israeli right wants to strangle Gaza. Israeli Banks Threaten to Cut Off Palestinian Economy, Deepening Crisis www.nytimes.com/2026/07/22/w... July 26, 2026 Michael Froomkin
As I read the article, it seems to be saying that the NSA has figured out how to grab data from fiber optic transmissions, but I’m not sure it clearly states that they have figured out how to decode public-key encryption using some other means than brute force; it mentions encryption as a signal that a given message is “interesting” (that is, itthose exchanging the messages have something to hide).
My understanding is that there is still no proof that a person’s private key cannot be derived from the public key, yet there is no known algorithm that can do this (besides brute force, which is effectively forestalled by increasing key length). Perhaps other more knowledgeable readers can comment, but I personally believe this problem to be both formidable and, for the foreseeable future, intractable. Indeed, if it were publicly revealed that a private key could be easily determined from an examination of the public key, it would throw the entire infrastructure of electronic commerce (not to mention international finance) into absolute chaos…
You-all should visit The Pink Bunny of Battle (http://pfaff.tcc.virginia.edu).
The article actually says that when they’ve identified someone who’s sending encrypted mail, and identified him as a target of interest, they can generally find ways to get the data which don’t involve breaking the encryption directly (perhaps along the lines of the remote screen-reading from Cryptonomicon… at any rate, let your imagination run riot).