On what the NSA does with its tech

[Dave Howe]

Morlock Elloi wrote:
> Hint: all major cryptanalytic advances, where governments broke a cypher and
> general public found out few *decades* later were not of brute-force kind.
all generalizations are false, including this one.
most of the WWII advances in computing were to brute-force code engines, 
not solve them analytically.
but yes - analysis has come a long way, and it is always going to be 
more cost effective for the NSA to hire mathematical geniuses (at 
however much it costs) than to build a brute-force cracker at the 
keysizes available today.
And cheaper still to do an end-run around the crypto and access 
plaintext on the microsoft-dominated internet.