Post #3558153

2026-07-03 07:37 UTC

Like, I am NOT a fan of the NSA, in the same way that I'm not a fan of Meta, Palantir, and the data broker industry. Surveillance is bad for society. Privacy is good for society. Using technology to undermine privacy and surveil people is a bad thing, actually. And while the official story is roughly that NSA only spies on other governments, and not innocent civilians, we have no way of knowing if that's true. And there's no way in hell I'll ever trust that. So, like most cryptographers, I'm squarely in the "Fuck the NSA" camp. Just like I'm in the "Fuck the FSB" camp. And every other nation state's equivalent agency is on that list too. But spy agencies aren't fucking magical. They can't violate information theory, physics, or causality. They also aren't omniscient about mathematics, logic, or software vulnerabilities. If they were, they wouldn't have competition. And they can't wave a magic wand and get enthusiastic cooperation from international forums of cryptology experts. That's ridiculous.

Replies (2)

@SuiGeneris3722@mastodon.social 2026-07-03 10:24

@soatok@furry.engineer You’re spot on. The biggest victory of these agencies is often the 'myth of the omniscient NSA,' because it scares people into thinking encryption is futile. When people believe they have 'magic' capabilities, they stop trying to defend their own privacy. It’s important to distinguish between 'they have immense resources' and 'they can break the laws of physics.' The former is true, but the latter is exactly what keeps us pushing for better standards.

Open ##3558152
@soatok@furry.engineer 2026-07-03 07:41

Every one of these agencies has a mission and a budget. To your or I, that budget might seem like "damn near infinite", but they still have constraints. NSA has two missions. Everyone knows about SIGINT because of Snowden, but they also have a competing mission called COMINT. You can, very loosely, map these two terms to "red team" and "blue team". If NSA knew a top secret way to break ML-KEM and were fairly confident that no other country has thought of it, there is no way in hell the SIGINT people could get the COMINT people to agree on a plan to migrate the entire federal fucking government to use ML-KEM. It doesn't line up with their self-interest.

Open ##3598268