“In room-size metal boxes secure against electromagnetic leaks, the National Security Agency is racing to build a computer that could break nearly every kind of encryption used to protect banking, medical, business and government records around the world,” Steven Rich and Barton Gellman report for The Washington Post. “According to documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the effort to build ‘a cryptologically useful quantum computer’ — a machine exponentially faster than classical computers — is part of a $79.7 million research program titled ‘Penetrating Hard Targets.'”
MacDailyNews Take: Sounds like a porn title.
“Much of the work is hosted under classified contracts at a laboratory in College Park, Md.,” Rich and Gellman report. “The development of a quantum computer has long been a goal of many in the scientific community, with revolutionary implications for fields such as medicine as well as for the NSA’s code-breaking mission. With such technology, all current forms of public key encryption would be broken, including those used on many secure Web sites as well as the type used to protect state secrets.”
“Although the full extent of the agency’s research remains unknown, the documents provided by Snowden suggest that the NSA is no closer to success than others in the scientific community,” Rich and Gellman report. “‘It seems improbable that the NSA could be that far ahead of the open world without anybody knowing it,’ said Scott Aaronson, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: But, Scott, the government is so good with tech projects…
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. – Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759
Visit the Apple-backed reformgovernmentsurveillance.com today.
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