[Cryptography] Sunday Times Snowden Decryption claims

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

By now you are probably familiar with the claim that among the papers
released by Snowden was a 'NOC List' of agents working under cover that the
Soviets decrypted and have used to kill them all.

Some folk have been suggesting the story is a nonsensical fraud on the
silly and spurious grounds that:

* There is no such thing as a NOC list outside stupid Hollywood movies.
Names of agents are never ever written down, let alone compiled in lists.

* MI6 has Officers working for it, CIA spies are called operatives. An
agent is a source and can be any source. Half the people on this list are
probably regarded as 'agents' because whether intentionally or not, knowing
or not, they have provided information to an operative in the past.

* If such a list did exist, it would be compartmentalized intelligence.
There would be no reason for a signals intelligence outfit to have such a
list, let alone Snowden.

* If such a list did exist, it would be encrypted with 256 bit encryption
minimum and the suite A ciphers are almost certainly at least as good as
AES.

But no, these are silly quibbles.

NSA can break any encryption. That is just a fact. So it is time that we
have to admit it and remove all the silly export restrictions on encryption
algorithms that can be broken because everything can.

Carry on.
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