-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Let's think this through a bit. Assuming no stupendous breakthrough, breaking encrypted messages will always take a significant amount of time (and depending on the amount of "stuff" you have to deal with, 1 or 2 seconds might be significant!). So I see really only two purposes for such a massive data center, and I suspect both are addressed. 1) Use best available (to the NSA) techniques for breaking selected encrypted messages. Presumably these would be those from foreign governments and from suspected terrorists etc. But this will always be a limited number of messages. 2) Traffic analysis, including plain text analysis of unencrypted communications. Sure, there is a lot of encrypted stuff out there. But there is also a ton of unencrypted stuff, or stuff where you can easily get access to the unencrypted version (aka financial transactions etc.). And even of the encrypted traffic, a lot can be discarded as boring (aka say all of the https traffic to amazon.com). I bet everyone on this list can send encrypted messages to each other and they will never be broken... because they probably already know who we all are and (at least I hope) have put us all in the "mostly harmless" bucket. -Jeff _______________________________________________________________________ Jeffrey I. Schiller MIT Technologist, Consultant, and Cavy Breeder Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 617.910.0259 - Voice jis@qyv.net http://jis.qyv.name _______________________________________________________________________ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFPbKJA8CBzV/QUlSsRAqJtAJwI505prm8QIPa857/zSIcQhuV5KQCg/nJP CIXRIirq9MlcZrjEDaTkRgE= =2C2m -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography@randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE