FBI Director: Ban Encryption to Counter Domestic Extremism

[actaeon277]

It's possible that the feds cracked it on their own. Way back in the early 90s, it was estimated that the NSA could crack a 1024 bit PGP encrypted message in a couple of months if they dedicated enough CPU power to it. The thought on Fidonet was that if everyone encrypted enough messages constantly, the feds would get so backlogged that they would never be able to do anything in close to real time.

I'm pretty sure that the computing power of the NSA has increased by orders of magnitude since then, so true "privacy" of any particular message may be only a matter of days. And if the feds have cracked whatever backdoors have been put in (or the companies handed them over voluntarily), then they will have near instant access to any message they want. After all, you don't need to spend time picking an individual lock if you have the master key to all of the locks.

Which is why most military things are encrypted, even when unnecessary.

 

[KLB]

Which is why most military things are encrypted, even when unnecessary.

Plus they never know when something "unimportant" could actually be important, and it stops people from accidently not encrypting something that is important.

 

[actaeon277]

Plus they never know when something "unimportant" could actually be important, and it stops people from accidently not encrypting something that is important.

Yes. dual purpose.
information denial
and overloading a cipher department