[Cryptography] Proof that the NSA does not have a quantum computer capable of attacking public key crypto (yet)

[John Gilmore]

> OK, that's not $500m, but the NSA is so deep into the world's
> financial system that it can practically create money.  Any time it
> needs funds all it has to do is steal the pots of various known and
> identified vulnerable parties - drugs barons, oligarchs in exile, US
> politicians who haven't approved NSA budget increases, Syrian
> despots.  The usual suspects.

You don't have to rob individual humans to create money.  You can
merely bet against them in markets.

It would be simple for NSA to play the stock market if it wants to
'create' money.  Look at how much money is made in speculating on
mergers and acquisitions -- then wonder how much better you could do
that job if you already had wiretaps on all of the relevant parties
(including the buyer, the seller, the regulators who'll have to
approve the deal, the market makers in those stocks, the disgruntled
major stockholders, etc).

And mergers are just a tiny corner of the overall stock market.  It
would also be easy to take money from ordinary people who were betting
the wrong way on an upcoming government report (e.g. about the level
of jobs or inflation or crops or manufacturing), or on what the
country's central government will do with interest rates.  The NSA
vacuum cleaner isn't quite the time-machine that would let you go back
and win horse races or do stock picks already knowing the winners.  But
if it even gives you an hour's notice of something that the public will
soon know, then there is *plenty* of money to be made.

NSA wouldn't even have to do that to American companies -- there are
trillions of dollars invested in foreign companies, on foreign stock
and commodities markets, where all it takes is one NSA "customer" to
ask, "what's the London stock exchange going to do tomorrow?" to give
NSA total cover for putting all the relevant taps into place.  Either
NSA or the "customer" could do all the rest.  (Thanks to Mr. Snowden,
we already have confirmation that they were tapping Brazilian oil
companies to extract economic information.)

One could even argue that developing the capability to use wiretapped
advance information to make money in a market is a useful offensive
"cyber" weapon for wartime, since it could be used to quietly and
painlessly extract resources from a country at war with the United
States, for the benefit of the United States or at least of one of its
agencies.  And hey, how can you really know it would work in a war,
unless you test and refine it all the time in peacetime?

The level of impunity that federal government employees now enjoy is
virtually unlimited - the only ones prosecuted are those who threaten
to blow the whistle on the rest.  It's surprising to me that NSA seems
to care at all what budget Congress appropriates to them.  But maybe
they feign care about that in one of those "whole departments running
deception operations".

	John