"could break nearly every kind of encryption used to protect banking, medical, business and government records around the world."

One can not violate human rights and be called a patriot.

There are those who call Snowden a traitor. That's pretty ironic, given that he put himself at great risk to expose the treasonous acts of a government agency.

Thanks for the welcome Indi Guy!

the Constitution.

He should instead face espionage charges. If acquitted, our system says he goes free. If convicted, the law provides appropriate penalties. My recollection is that the death penalty is off the table for acts committed when war isn't declared.

What he is not is a whistle-blower - neither in what he stole nor in the manner he disclosed it.

I'd like to see your case that the President (which directs NSA through the Secretary of Defense and Director of National Intelligence) has waged war against the US or given aid to it's enemies. (see the Constitution for the exact wording) I believe that absent a declaration of war, defining an "enemy" is rhetorical at best.

...treason is generally defined as giving aid of some sort to the enemy; so I'll ask you this:


item - The NSA is sharing data with Israel. Before filtering out Americans’ information.

Although Israel is not an enemy per se...

• How would you categorize the criminal action of turning over raw intel to the Israeli government without first protecting data belonging to American citizens?

...then he's a traitor. I suggest that it is highly likely that he had to strike a deal with both governments to ensure shielding from the long arm of the US government. What else does he have to trade on besides US national security secrets?

He's likely made US citizens less safe by exchanging our security for his.

...is collaborating with our government against their country of origin? You might say, "But we're the good guys." Look & see how much our laws now mirror those of Russia & China. Have you ever heard of the FISA court's secret interpretation of The Patriot Act (as if the obvious interpretation weren't already a gaping wound to our Constitution)?

them an enemy of the US. There's no declaration of war or even an AUMF that designates them as out adversary. It's my opinion and I'm not a lawyer, but being assholes wouldn't quite cross the enemy threshold as a legal matter.

...solely on the basis of our allowing China to hold about $3 trillion of our debt. __Not to mention the $280 billion annual trade deficit with her. This is very disturbing, given that we're talking about an unapologetically communist regime.

Where's the vitriol for those responsible for this outrage?

Not liking a nation is falls short of "enemy".

My comments were aimed indirectly at psychopomp in post #27.

...about our governance, there comes a time when the ideologue goggles gotta' come off -- and reality be faced.

There are unelected criminal elements positioned at the highest levels of power in our government. ...Higher even than the president in that they make autonomous decisions of tremendous import, while being accountable to absolutely no one.

I love my country with a burning passion; and it sickens me to no end to see it corrupted by these faceless and arrogant corporate weasels.

You show those medical records who's boss, NSA tough guys!

...driving this train. There's clearly a design here, and one need only look history to see the kind of agenda which involves wholesale surveillance of all citizenry. ...And I guarantee that all but a very select few would like the outcome if this plan is allowed to come to fruition.

I think there's a sense that it's quantum, sort of, but not in a way that makes it especially useful. Not being able to, by design, run Shor's algorithm, means they've already precluded the first quantum "killer app" from their platform.

As for NSA's effort, it's still not obvious exactly which physical implementation will be robust and scalable first. That assessment also seems to change every 5 years or so.

I think 10 years is optimistic, 20 years likely for the kind of capability they're discussing. That's just a WAG on my part from hearing academics in that field talking...

I'm sure my quantum computing theory chops are no match for yours, caraher, but after reading a "New Yorker" profile of David Deutsch, his book "The Fabric of Reality," and following up with some on-line reading on QC in general, I distinctly recall a reference or two to D-Wave's platform not being truly QC, but I really couldn't explain why without going back to the source.

I try to keep up on Deutsch, but also recall him expressing a personal disinterest in implementation. It would still be interesting to get his take on all this.


- bvf

I am skeptical that quantum effects will successfully be brought into the macro world in any very useful way, the consequences get pretty dramatic. "Magical" even. And I just don't believe in magic any more. The trap-door functions will not be reversed by quantum magic.

I think the OP is a combination of advertising (for the D-wave) and FUD.

Nuclear reactors, nuclear bombs, photovoltaics, LED's, superconductors, etc, etc, etc.

Quantum encryption will allow encrypted communication that can't be decrypted by quantum computers.

Here's another one:

(Your link.)

I am not suggesting quantum mechanics is not real, I'm suggesting they won't be able to scale it up like they think, essentially on heuristic grounds, like with the anthropic principle.

And I'm talking about using it to circumvent the limitations of Turing machines, specifically to break mathematical encryption.

It's a Sci-Fi writer's dream come true.

These truly are interesting times.

Computers get faster over time. That is the way technology works. Eventually, most encryption that we think of as "unbreakable" now will be easily breakable. It's inevitable.

Development of the internet itself was partially driven by military and government research.

There are many things to not like about the NSA, but their development of better faster technology may not be a bad thing.

That's what you need, to know what's going on around you. And we live a long time, so you have to remember things a long time too, and we talk and are nomadic, so we need to remember a lot.

We have cleverly extended that pattern-recognition capability for our use in language and symbolic thinking (lot's of pattern recognition going on when you listen to someone talk or when you read).

Computers are lousy (slow) at pattern recognition because of the von Neumann architecture, you need massive parallelism for fast general pattern recognition, not the simplest possible computing architecture.

And such systems have to be grown, they must be trained, they must learn the patterns they are to recognize, they start out empty and general, like an infant.

Once you have one trained up the way you like, you can make copies, but if it fails or does not meet new conditions, you may have to start over. You cannot necessarily retrain it to meet new conditions. Learning can be a trap-door function too.

but we know that knowledge and the power that knowledge gives can be used for good or for bad.

I am not a scientist or computer theorist but my understanding is the power of quantum computing is akin to the power of the atom. Any corporation or government (in our case our insidious NSA) with that power can ratchet up their control.

Even up to about 10 years ago you could get by without a computer or having computer skills. Today that is not conceivable. When I recently went to see an ENT they didn't even have intake forms on paper. If you were a new patient you were directed to a bank of computers with a login code and you entered all of your information into their system. I recently moved and needed to request a replacement driver's license with my new address. I could do this online in about 10 minutes or could go to a DMV office that only processes address change requests in person on Tue and Thu mornings from 9-12. There is no "mail-in" application.

It is virtually impossible not to be ensnared in the technological nightmare we have created. I love technology and use it extensively but even if you wanted to you couldn't avoid it.

In that regard I applaud the "preppers" who do what they can to live "off the grid" and as disconnected from the rest of society as possible.

This computing power could, as the article suggests, help advance medicine, space exploration, etc. but it could also be used for very nefarious purposes.

Given that we are unable to manage the NSA today with their wide-reaching capabilities, they are unstoppable. I really don't think even Congressional action to dismantle and de-fund the NSA would have any effect. The secret government would continue to operate as it does today - thumbing its nose at Congress and the American people. They are a government unto themselves and they know it.

All security paradigms will eventually fail. Not based on math but purely observation. It's as certain in cryptography as Moore's Law is in computing. The most secure paradigm of 1000 years ago, can be breached undetected today in seconds. (It was the sealed envelope.)

This project is itself useless unless NSA is itself working on an encryption for their own secure data that is quantum-proofed. Absent that condition, they'd be better off working to ensure that nobody else can build the technology rather than building it themselves.

Otherwise, you have the exact open-system where there is no encrypted data and everybody's laundry is on display that has been an ideal-goal of groups like Wikileaks & Anonymous and which ultimately threatens to destroy society in the satirical science-fiction novel Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway.

See post #17.

Mathematical encryption is not unbreakable, exhaustive search will always do the job, it just won't do it soon enough. It's a performance issue. Same applies to encryption methods, they just have to be "unbreakable" until nobody cares.

Last edited Tue Jan 7, 2014, 12:43 AM - Edit history (1)

But boy is it sad that funding for it finally came from such evil places.