[Freedombox-discuss] Friendica Red

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sat, Sep 22, 2012 at 10:06:45AM +0100, Bob Mottram wrote:
> On 22.09.2012 03:08, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
>> That is false.  It is not prohibitively expensive.
>>
>> https://www.eff.org/nsa/faq
>
>
> But if the deep packets only contain cyphertext then decrypting them is  
> not so economical.  However, if they just store the data and then wait  
> for 20 years it's possible that by then there will either be enough  
> (quantum) computing power to decrypt anything from our time, or  

It is not obvious that QC is going to scale. Not all cyphers can
be mapped to QC parallelism.

> vulnerabilities will have been found which render contemporary methods  
> useless.

Most of the casual secrets we want to protect are pretty much 
worthless if disclosed a couple decades downstream. If I don't 
want my ISP to spy on me to build marketable profiles then a simple VPN
egressing to address space out of control of the ISP will 
protect me. Tor or I2P will protect me against local national
agencies, unless I'm a person of interest which involves 
using other methods and co-operation of multiple intelligence
services.

It is much more interesting to look at traffic analysis, as in
who's talking to whom. If you add social graph analysis to that
you can easily identify high value targets (who're clueless enough
to not use one-time pad or air gap communication via trusted
couriers).