Quote from: bynter on January 09, 2013, 08:43 amWow. It's actually really reassuring to see that my question wasn't nearly as stupid as I thought it would have been received. It was not a stupid question. Quote from: bynter on January 09, 2013, 08:43 amSo I guess that means that if you have access to a company with huge servers, it'd only take a few weeks to crack messages. Only if the messages in question were encrypted with keys of 512-bits or less. Keys with moduli of 2048-bits are expected to be safe until around 2030 or thereabouts. 4096-bit keys are expected to be secure for perhaps another 10-15 years after that. These estimations are based on current knowledge of factoring, and assuming that Moore's law continues in effect. Naturally, breakthroughs can occur at any time, so these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. Quote from: bynter on January 09, 2013, 08:43 amI have a feeling once this NSA thing is completed, this site will see a lot more arrests. Man, fuck post-9/11 paranoia. but how come it isn't practical for banks to crack the encryption for competing banks, then publicly release that information and blame it on Anonymous? The facility currently being completed in Utah is expected to function primarily as a storage facility. Rather than choosing which targets to harvest information on, apparently the practice will be to surveil everyone, so if an individual (or group of them) become persons of interest, a wealth of information will already be available for data-mining. As far as seeing a lot more arrests on this site? That's not at all likely to happen. You have to remember that, even if quantum computers actually existed in a state which could break the majority of currently enciphered traffic, this would be a state secret. It would be used against other governments, possibly against terror cells -- it is not likely to be used against individual drug users, especially small-time users. Look back at history. The British (with the help of the Poles) managed to obtain some German Enigma cipher machines. Thanks to the efforts of a dedicated group of people (including Alan Turing) the British managed to crack the Enigma. They were reading high-level German cipher traffic as soon as the German generals themselves got it. This was considered _so_ important, that knowledge of this was classified until the mid-1970s. Similarly, around 1970, Ellis & Cocks, two cryptographers at GCHQ, the British equivalent of the NSA, developed what they called "non-secret encryption." This was the first public-key cryptosystem. Several years later, Diffie, Hellman and Merkle independently struck upon the same concept, and published a paper, letting the cat out of the bag. Naturally, the British immediately classified Ellis and Cocks' work, and nothing further came of it. Even when Diffie visited Ellis in Britain, the man remained mum about his discovery. The closest he came to even admitting it existed, was a comment he made to Diffie to the effect that, "You did more with it then we ever did." So, even if any breakthroughs have been made, information from these will not be used to prosecute small time drug users, or even pedophiles. Secrecy is too important to let it be endangered by such uses. Furthermore, you have to understand that agency rivalry is a major factor here -- the Intelligence agencies don't trust each other -- the NSA doesn't trust the CIA, and neither the CIA nor the NSA trust the FBI, let alone the DEA. For their part, the NSA's prime directive, if you will, is to protect anyone from learning of their true capabilities. They're not going to be caught dead sharing information with other agencies that might shed light on their capabilities. Finally, there is both politics as well as economics to contend with. In the past 40 years, since Nixon began the War on Drugs, America has changed dramatically -- from being a creditor nation, to a debtor nation. America's manufacturing infrastructure is hollowed-out, and the middle class is in real danger of becoming extinct. I would argue that the Drug War is a war that America can no longer afford. We're already beginning to see the cracks in that political position, with two states legalizing marijuana. This is just the tip of the iceberg. It may take another generation (or even two) but eventually Americans will conclude that the Drug War is unsustainable. The true irony is that both the U.S. government and the drug cartels are on the same side -- both of them are terrified of legalization. If drugs were legalized, the cartel's profits would vanish in a puff of smoke. Nightcrawler <Nightcrawler@SR>PGP-Key: 4096R/BBF7433B 2012-09-22Key fingerprint = D870 C6AC CC6E 46B0 E0C7 3955 B8F1 D88E BBF7 433Bhttp://dkn255hz262ypmii.onion/index.php?topic=174.msg633090#msg633090