Edward Snowden's Plight Reveals the Possibility that Encryption is No Longer Effective

Let's examine a fact pattern for a moment. Glenn Greenwald was in Hong Kong recently to interview Edward Snowden, and learned that Snowden had distributed sensitive encrypted files. In a subsequent Skype conversation, he reported this to his partner in Brazil and advised him to expect a copy of those files soon. Although he never actually sent the files, his partner's laptop was later stolen from their home.^[1]

This suggests that somebody wanted a copy of those files badly enough to steal a laptop that contained them. More importantly, it also suggests that someone knew where they could find a copy of those files and may have learned their location by decrypting the previously described Skype conversation, which was AES encrypted.^[2]

We can easily find articles to support the contention that quantum computers will be, or are, capable of efficiently decrypting AES encryption.^[3] Finally, it is common knowledge that the NSA is building a massive data center in Utah, and that the government is simultaneously overtly expressing interest in D-Wave's 512 qubit quantum computers (i.e. NASA joined Google in a $10 million partnership to purchase a D-Wave Two in May of 2013^[4]).

This begs the question of whether the government's covert agencies have already built a computer capable of real-time AES decryption, and whether any of our current privacy measures is secure against their intrusion. Please be aware of this possibility and remain vigilant in collecting relevant empirical evidence to support this theory.

[1] Greenwald: Snowden’s Files Are Out There if ‘Anything Happens’ to Him - The Daily Beast

[2] Does Skype use encryption? - Skype

[3] Quantum computer – Wikipedia

[4] Google and NASA Turn to New D-Wave Computer – IEEE

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