Quote from: Banjo on May 24, 2012, 04:31 pmQuoteAs such even if the NSA have managed to find a way to break open our e-mails, do you really think they'll show their entire hand for the sake of a few kilos of drugs?Exactly. Truly cracking RSA is one of the holy grails of cryptography. If the NSA (or anyone else) has developed a way to do it, they're absolutely not going to share it, not even with the LEA of their own governments, because it would be one of the most powerful intelligence gathering methods available. Cryptographic agencies are some of the most, if not THE most, secretive branches of government. By using their ability to catch a few low-level drug buyers/dealers, they'd effectively be giving up their ability to read other government's and terrorists' communication at willI've posted in a separate thread a link to Simon Singh's Code Book which actually provides the RSA algorithim and explains in Layman's terms that it works by using modular arithmetic on large prime numbers.In order to beat RSA we'd need a faster way to factor Prime numbers - this as you say is something of a Holy Grail of Cryptography and Singh postulates a "quantum" computer would be able to do just that but the technology is apparently still in its infancy.Certainly keeping the methods used close to their chest would be in keeping with governments in ages past. The government in my country asked Charles Babbage not to publish his solution to the Vignere Cipher (the so-called "unbreakable" cipher!). Similarly after the war we supplied our former colonies with captured German Enigma machines, the encryption for which we'd been cheerfully breaking throughout the war.*As we said though, if you were in the German government's position would you risk revealing that information in an open trial for the sake of a few drug dealers or keep it a secret and spy in your country's enemies?V.*For the purists out there, yes there was more than one type of machine and no we didn't break Nazi naval encryption.