AT&T And The NSA
For those who have not heard, the EFF is suing AT&T for its participation in an illegal NSA surveillance program. Wired has published a good article on this and some evidence provided by the EFF, especially AT&T’s internal documents provided by one of their technician (on EFF side).
Computer geeks know how to protect themselves from the NSA (basically encrypting everything and not being from Al Qaeda) and even though the NSA is way more advanced than civilian cryptanalysts, huge keys should still work (>= 4096 bits for instance) They could use computing breakthrough (quantum computing, new algorithms,…) to break them, but I doubt they have had.
The US way is to declassify fast any technology that can have a lot of impact on US economy and a breakthrough such as this would. This is how it happened with transistor and computers. A few month after their inventions, they were declassified. We are not anymore in the Cold War, so there is even less need to act like this.
It is true though it seems US military (including NSA) have a lot of advances in cryptanalysis techniques. The DES is using some techniques find by civilians years after. Actually, some techniques were found after (and not because) the DES was declassified. They found out then it was already used in DES. (told by Stéphane Natkin in a CNAM class).
