Dave Emory’s entire lifetime of work is available on a flash drive that can be obtained here. (The flash drive includes the anti-fascist books available on this site.)
COMMENT: A term that is essential for users of this website to comprehend is “fifth column.” The advance and success of fascism prior to, and during, World War II would not have been possible without the aid of the fifth columns.
It is for that reason that books about fifth column fascist movements and activity are included in the “Books” category.
Vitally important, though long forgotten, books like Under Cover and Cairo to Damascus by John Roy Carlson, Falange–The Secret Axis Army in the Americas by Alan Chase, Armies of Spies by Joseph Golomb, The Nazis Go Underground by Curt Riess, and Triumph of Treason by Pier Cot shed light on the profound presence of Nazis, fascists and their sympathizers within countries targeted for fascist conquest.
As background to this discussion, we might coin the term “deep fifth column”–powerful and dominant forces that saw fascism–“corporatism” as Mussolini termed it–as a wonderful solution to what they saw as “problems”–democracy and trade unions among them.
(Parenthetically, we note that ours is a failed civilization–one that has failed to take into account the great economic, political and intellectual power behind fascism. World War II is seen by our culture as an unfortunate event, caused by a “bunch of weirdos, who got out of hand.” It is for this reason that we include books about the altogether deadly (and sadly eclipsed) forces that caused the bloodletting in the Second World War, much of the global carnage that has ensued since, and the annihilating future that awaits our civilization, if political inertia prevails.
We also note that much of the success of The Underground Reich has been Germany’s masterful strategic use of anti-communism and class warfare as a gambit to infiltrate and co-opt the power elites of countries targeted for subversion. Whereas anti-communism and class struggle are seen by American and other elites as ends in themselves, to realize “corporatism”–Germany has used those as vehicles for conquest.)
We also note in this context that the fifth columns were never addressed in many countries. Just as Germany was never really de-Nazified, the fifth columns were never rooted out in many of the other Western countries, including the United States, United Kingdom and France. The fifth columns–the deep fifth columns in particular–were critical to the enabling and formation of The Underground Reich.
Listeners and users of this website should make it a point to download, print and read the books dealing with the “deep fifth column.”
In our recent, voluminous analysis of “Snowden’s Ride”–the Nazi psy-op so successfully perpetrated by Eddie The Friendly Spook and the forces who have managed his escapade–we are looking at the activities of an Underground Reich milieu/intelligence network. Our series on this is long, complex and multi-layered: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII, Part IX, Part X, Part XI, Part XII, Part XIII, Part XIV, Part XV, Part XVI, Part XVII.
It is less clear precisely who is the immediate intelligence controller of Eddie the Friendly Spook, although BND is almost certainly involved and may be the ultimate executive authority. The probability is very strong that a “deep fifth column” within U.S. intelligence, military, corporate and political structure is involved.
A recent (and predictably slanted) Wall Street Journal article dealt with a leak of Naval Intelligence secrets during the course of World War II.
Disclosing the pivotal fact that U.S. intelligence had cracked the Japanese “White Code” (not specified in the WSJ article), “Colonel” Robert R. McCormick’s Chicago Tribune leaked vital information for the second time in less than a year.
Having previously leaked the Rainbow Five contingency plan for U.S. mobilization and war-making documents for the Second World War, McCormick was a member of America First. Ostensibly isolationist and “patriotic” in outlook, the organization was, in fact, actively funded by Third Reich intelligence and comprised (for the most part) of doctrinaire fascists who loved Hitler and Mussolini and hated Franklin Delano Roosevelt with a passion.
(For a good understanding of the active pro-fascist nature of America First, open Under Cover by John Roy Carl, son and use the “find” function on your computer, searching “America First.” This will yield a good understanding of the nature of that organization and its members.)
As discussed in AFA #11, the probable source of the leak of the Rainbow Five program was General Albert Wedemeyer, one of its primary authors and an active America Firster. (See text excerpts below for information about Wedemeyer and the leak of Rainbow Five.)
A lynchpin of the China Lobby, the MacArthur group in the military and the milieu that coalesced into the John Birch Society, Wedemeyer studied at the German military academy, beginning in 1936, renting his apartment from Gerhard Rossbach, one of the leaders of the Brownshirts (SA.) Later (as dicsussed in AFA #11) Rossbach went to work for the CIA in the postwar period.
Yet another point about Wedemeyer set forth in AFA #11 is the fact that Ronald Reagan appointed Wedemeyer as a special military adviser.
In a book excerpt below, Wedemeyer blames the leak of Rainbow Five on–of course–Franklin Delano Roosevelt, claiming that it was part of Roosevelt’s plan to get the United States into World War II. Roosevelt was conveniently dead by the time Wedemeyer held forth. (This is a major claim of the deep fifth column through the decades, since picked up and amplified by the conspiracy crowd.)
In his predictably self-serving analysis, Wedemeyer does reveal something interesting about the networking in which McCormick engaged. Wedemeyer maintains that McCormick sent the Rainbow Five information directly to Hitler!
Again, discussion of Snowden’s Ride, per se, is beyond the scope of this post. It is, quite clearly, a fascist/Underground Reich operation, with the ultimate executive authority being the BND, in all probability.
It may be that an Underground Reich fifth column within U.S. intelligence is involved, ultimately answering to BND.
One important possibility entails Peter Thiel, whose Palantir company appears to be the developer of the PRISM software. Thiel embodies the concept of the deep fifth column. German born, son of a chemical engineer from Frankfurt (read “I.G. Farben”), Thiel has openly negated the concept of democracy, hates Obama and is the chief financial backer of crypto-Nazi Ron Paul, to whose campaign Eddie the Friendly Spook contributed. The “Paulistinians” are to be found at many levels of this concatenation.
In addition, Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir and someone who appears to have been centrally involved in the development of Thiel’s career also has roots in Frankfurt Germany! (See text excerpts below.)
NOTE: Palantir officially claims that “their PRISM” is NOT the same PRISM in the focal point of the Snowden/NSA imbroglio. We feel this claim is laughable, frankly. The notion that the intelligence services are using TWO counter-terror software programs with identical names is not credible. Had a company developed a counter-terror software program for use by the intelligence community and called it “PRISM,” there would have been litigation. The major tech companies are NOTHING if not litigious, and Thiel and company have PLENTY of money!
That Obama is dealing with a deep fifth column in these leaks is a possibility to be seriously considered.
“Echoes From a Past Leak Probe” by Jess Bravin; Wall Street Journal; 8/7/2013.
Newly released documents provide a road map of how the government tried to mount a no-holds-barred legal attack against journalists suspected of leaking military secrets.
But the memos weren’t about the current-day Bradley Manning case. They came after a disclosure 71 years ago about World War II’s Battle of Midway and show the U.S. has long wrestled with how to square national security and press freedom.
The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the executive branch on the extent of its own powers, published in late July a selection of previously secret legal opinions spanning from 1933 to 1977. Among them were memos about a June 7, 1942, scoop in the Chicago Tribune by correspondent Stanley Johnston, who saw a naval intelligence file while traveling with the Pacific Fleet.
Pentagon officials were stunned by the headline, “U.S. Navy Knew in Advance All About Jap Fleet,” when they saw the story, which also ran in the Washington Times-Herald. The article all but revealed one of the war’s greatest secrets: that the U.S. had cracked the Japanese navy’s code. It reported that Japanese fleet strength “was well known in American naval circles,” that the U.S. Navy knew the Japanese were likely to stage a feint against the Aleutian Islands, and that “the advance information enabled the American Navy to make full use of air attacks on the approaching Japanese ships.”
Navy Secretary Frank Knox wrote to Attorney General Francis Biddle, demanding indictments. The headline alone “discloses secret and confidential information to the detriment of our national defense,” Mr. Knox wrote. Mr. Biddle then asked staff for advice, resulting in the just-released memos. . . .
. . . . The memos are noticeably silent on one possibly pertinent point: Tribune’s publisher, Col. Robert R. McCormick, was an incendiary antagonist of the New Deal and, before Pearl Harbor at least, a vociferous opponent of intervention in World War II. . . .
“The Big Leak” by Thomas Fleming; American Heritage Magazine; December 1987.
EXCERPT: . . . .General Wedemeyer, still erect and mentally alert, recalled the atmosphere he encountered when he walked into the Munitions Building at 7:30 A.M. on December 5. “Officers were standing in clumps, talking in low tones. Silence fell, and they dispersed the moment they saw me. My secretary, her eyes red from weeping, handed me a copy of the Times Herald with Manly’s story on the front page. I could not have been more appalled and astounded if a bomb had been dropped on Washington.”
For the next several days Wedemeyer almost wished a bomb had been dropped and had landed on him. He was the chief suspect in the leak of Rainbow Five, which within the closed doors of the War Department was called the Victory Program. He had strong ties to America First, the leading antiwar group in the nation. Both he and his father-in-law, Lt. Gen. Stanley D. Embick, were known to be opponents of Roosevelt’s foreign policy, which they thought was leading the United States into a premature and dangerous war. . . .
. . . . Later in this tumultuous morning two FBI agents appeared in Wedemeyer’s office and examined the contents of his safe. Their eyes widened when they discovered a copy of the Victory Program with everything that had appeared in the newspapers underlined. The sweating Wedemeyer explained that he had just done the underlining to get a clear idea of how much had been revealed. The two agents began an interrogation of Wedemeyer and other Army and Navy officers that continued for months.
Several Army staff officers said they strongly suspected Wedemeyer of being the leaker. An anonymous letter, obviously written by an insider and addressed to the Secretary of War, accused him and General Embick. Wedemeyer’s prospects grew even bleaker when the FBI discovered he had recently deposited several thousand dollars in the Riggs National Bank in Washington. He explained it was an inheritance and went on manfully to admit to the FBI that he knew Gen. Robert E. Wood, Charles A. Lindbergh, and other leaders of America First and agreed with some of their views. He often attended America First meetings, although never in uniform. . . .
. . . . On December 7, 1941, the question of Rainbow Five’s impact on American politics became moot. Japanese planes swooped out of the dawn sky to devastate the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. The Victory Program had envisaged devoting almost all of America’s military strength to defeating Hitler. Japan, in that scenario, was to be handled by defensive strategies short of war. . . .
In and Out of Hollywood: A Biographer’s Memoir by Charles Higham; p. 212.
EXCERPT: . . . . [Burton Wheeler], seeing the plan as a breach of neutrality and proof of Roosevelt’s illegal and supraconstitutional behavior, in turn took the plan to another isolationist, Robert R. McCormick, owner and publisher of the Chicago Tribune, who at once published it on the front page.
Simultaneously, McCormick sent the plan to Hitler by Western Union. Hitler met with Joachim von Ribbentrop, his foreign minister, and asked him if the existence of the plan called for immediate action. . . .
“How Team of Geeks Cracked Spy Trade” by Siobhan Ghorban; The Wall Street Journal; 9/4/2009.
EXCERPT: . . . Palantir CEO Mr. Karp says such criticism doesn’t trouble him. He says the company is already expanding rapidly.
Palantir’s roots date back to 2000, when Mr. Karp returned to the U.S. after living for years in Frankfurt, where he earned his doctorate in German social philosophy and discovered a talent for investing. He reconnected with a buddy from Stanford Law School, Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of online payment company PayPal.
In 2003, Mr. Thiel pitched an idea to Mr. Karp: Could they build software that would uncover terror networks using the approach PayPal had devised to fight Russian cybercriminals?
PayPal’s software could make connections between fraudulent payments that on the surface seemed unrelated. By following such leads, PayPal was able to identify suspect customers and uncover cybercrime networks. The company saw a tenfold decrease in fraud losses after it launched the software, while many competitors struggled to beat back cheaters.
Mr. Thiel wanted to design software to tackle terrorism because at the time, he says, the government’s response to issues like airport security was increasingly “nightmarish.” The two launched Palantir in 2004 with three other investors, but they attracted little interest from venture-capital firms. The company’s $30 million start-up costs were largely bankrolled by Mr. Thiel and his own venture-capital fund.
They modeled Palantir’s culture on Google’s, with catered meals of ahi tuna and a free-form 24-hour workplace wired so 16 people can play the Halo video game. The kitchen is stocked by request with such items as Pepto Bismol and glass bottles of Mexican Coca Cola sweetened with sugar not corn syrup. The company recently hosted its own battle of the bands.
One of the venture firms that rejected Palantir’s overtures steered the company to In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit venture-capital firm established by the CIA a decade ago to tap innovation that could be used for intelligence work. As Silicon Valley’s venture funding dries up, In-Q-Tel says it has seen a surge of requests from start-ups in the last year or so, many of which now see the government as an alternate money stream.
In-Q-Tel invested about $2 million in Palantir and provided a critical entreé to the CIA and other agencies. For his first spy meeting in 2005, Mr. Karp shed his track suit for a sports coat. He arrived at an agency — he won’t say which one — and was immediately “freaked out” by security officers guarding the building with guns. In a windowless, code-locked room, he introduced himself to the first official he met: “Hi, I’m Alex Karp,” Mr. Karp said, offering his hand. No response. “I didn’t know you really don’t ask their names,” he says now.
Mr. Karp showed the group a prototype. The software was similar to PayPal’s fraud-detection system. But instead of identifying and connecting cyber criminals, it focused on two hypothetical terror suspects and followed their activities, including travel and money transfers.
After the demo, he was peppered with skeptical questions: Is anyone at your company cleared to work with classified information? Have you ever worked with intelligence agencies? Do you have senior advisers who have worked with intelligence agencies? Do you have a sales force that is cleared to work with classified information? The answer every time: no.
But the group was sufficiently intrigued by the demo, and In-Q-Tel arranged for Palantir engineers to meet directly with intelligence analysts, to help build a comprehensive search tool from scratch. . . .
Thank you so much for this marvelous post. I’ve downloaded all the books you recommended but it’ll take me a while to get through them.
The who and the why have always been evident. It’s the HOW that made the pig’s tail curl. (Translation from a Spanish aphorism. The pig’s tail was straight until he encountered a problem that was so difficult to solve the intellectual effort made it’s tail curl.) Like 911! We know who and why but exactly how it was done is anybody’s guess because we simply don’t have access to all the information. Sometimes not even the people directly involved know exactly what part they’ve played in the operation.
That’s what happens to me with the concept of the Underground Reich and the means by which it will take over the world. When Bush (Dubya) started increasing the deficit and foreign debt shortly after 911 I knew it was being purposely done to crash the US economy. It was almost like a carbon copy of the method they used in several Latin American countries back in the 80’s and 90’s. Only in our case the money was simply stolen by the politicians whereas in the US I saw it invested in the military and I kept asking myself: “Why? What is the purpose of such a large military if not to initiate a large scale war?”…. When you talked about the destruction and balkanization of the US I was doubtful precisely because of this but the other day I came across the following article:
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/are-these-the-last-days-of-the-u-s-marine-corps
“Are These The Last Days Of The U.S. Marine Corps?
By Michael Snyder, on August 11th, 2013
Are the current personnel cuts the beginning of the end for the U.S. Marines? Could these actually be the last days of the U.S. Marine Corps? A decade ago, such a notion would have been absolutely unthinkable, but times have changed. The Marine Corps was already in the process of drawing down from a peak of 202,100 Marines to 182,100, and now Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is warning that the sequester cuts may force the Army to be cut down to a size of 380,000 and the Marine Corps to be cut down to a size of 150,000. Unfortunately for the Marines, even larger cuts may eventually be coming. Many in the Obama administration and in the Pentagon are now openly questioning whether there will be an important role for the Marines to play in the future.”
Do you think this is what will happen to the US military as a whole? First they started outsourcing jobs, then they started moving companies to other countries. After 911 they borrowed trillions of dollars (totally destroying the US economy) which has made budget cuts necessary for everything, including the military. You know how the economists keep talking about “bubbles”? Has this been the greatest bubble of all? Borrowing money to blow up the military only to pop it when there is not enough money to sustain it?
I came across this on the internet regarding Karp
http://thepatriotperspective.wordpress.com/2012/07/29/why-the-pentagon-should-be-suspicious-of-palantir/
It was an unlikely match. Before joining Palantir, Karp had spent years studying in Germany under Jürgen Habermas, the most prominent living representative of the Frankfurt School, the group of neo-Marxist philosophers and sociologists. After getting a PhD in philosophy from the University of Frankfurt—he also has a degree from Stanford Law School—Karp drifted from academia and dabbled in stocks. He proved so good at it that, with the backing of a handful of European billionaires, he set up a money management firm called the Caedmon Group. His intellect, and ability to solve a Rubik’s Cube in under a minute, commands an awed reverence around the Palantir offices, where he’s known as Dr. Karp.
…
Palantir’s name refers to the “seeing stones” in Lord of the Rings that provide a window into other parts of Middle-earth. They’re magical tools created by elves that can serve both good and evil. Bad wizards use them to keep in touch with the overlord in Mordor; good wizards can peer into them to check up on the peaceful, innocent Hobbits of the Shire. As Karp explains with a straight face, his company’s grand, patriotic mission is to “protect the Shire.”
This is a problem. This is statism in cute terms. This is a neo-Marxist who believes in the supremacy of the state, immediately getting in tight with the state, in order to “execute against the world’s most important problems”. Wanna bet his definition and yours as a free citizen disagree?
The analogy and their name is apt. The palantir was used for evil. A palantir outright used by a tyrant is easy to see as evil. A palantir used for spying on hobbits “to check up on innocent Hobbits” invades their privacy and is just another apparatus of the tyrant. So what happens if the hobbits don’t want to be spied on?
…
The secretive data-analysis startup, based in Palo Alto, Calif. and backed by early Facebook investor Peter Thiel, has suffered a number of blows to its public image of late. The most recent is the settlement of a lawsuit filed by rival i2 Group, based in McLean, Va., over accusations that Palantir employees fraudulently obtained i2 software and used it to design competing products.
Since Palantir touts itself as the product of fraud-detection technologies pioneered at PayPal, the payments startup Thiel cofounded, those charges present ironies, as i2’s lawyers eagerly pointed out in their initial complaint.
Separately, Palantir CEO Alex Karp issued a public statement apologizing for his company’s role in preparing a plan for Bank of America to strike back at Wikileaks, the Internet-based nonprofit group famed for obtaining and releasing sensitive documents into the public domain. The company also placed employee Matthew Steckman on leave after hackers released emails showing he was involved in preparing a similar plan for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to damage ThinkProgress, a pro-labor publication.
Isn’t that peculiar. Are they playing to their audience of statists, or are they damaging rivals, or what exactly are they doing? Wikileaks and ThinkProgress
the NSA has been directing the economic course of the tech industry according to article from the Connection newwpaper in santa cruz, last month.
when i worked in this industry, it was known the intel put unique id # on each computer to match the trapdoor in msdos from microsoft.
a french intel report 1999 states:
“it would seem that the creation of microsoft was largely supported, not least financially, by the NSA, and that IBM was made to accept the MSDOS operating system” ...“insistent rumors about the existence of spy programs on microsoft and by the presence of NSA personnel”
multibillionaire gates, richest man in america, is a closet spook with a trapdoor into every life, before experts talked about it.
“inside the code were 2 labels for keys, one was called NSAKEY”
its possible, we been hosed, 60 yrs of mkultra brain-mining and still we are too 911 shocked to stop it.
WTF?
There was a fascinating Reuters piece about one of those looming potentially world-change events that could be coming any year now. Or maybe already arrived, very quietly. That was would “Q‑day”, the day quantum codebreaking allows for the breaking of all of the encrypted data humanity has ever generated. Or, almost all of it.
As we’ve seen, experts have been predicting “Q‑day” might not arrive until the 2030s. But that doesn’t mean it can’t come sooner. That was the warning recently delivered to the US Department of Defense by Tilo Kunz, executive vice president of Canadian cybersecurity firm Quantum Defen5e (QD5). According to Kunz, “Q‑day” could be year as soon as 2025. And that’s assuming it’s not quietly already here.
But Kunz wasn’t just warning about an eventually that might arrive sooner rather than later. As Kunz described, we should already be concerned about the integrity and security of today’s encrypted data, whether or not “Q‑day” has been achieved yet. That’s because the day of “harvest now, decrypt later” is already here. Because don’t forget what “Q‑day” represents: the ability to break almost any encryption algorithm ever developed. Meaning data collected, today, last week, last year, or 50 years ago that could previously be decrypted will now be readable. With incredible security implications for everyone.
This “harvest now, decrypt later” scenario isn’t a hypothetical. As Kunz also reminded jthe DOD, one of the greatest code breaking feats in history was as “harvest now, decrypt later” event: the Venona project. A 37 year efforts started in 1943 that eventually allowed for the decryption of thousands of Soviet intelligence sent between 1940 and 1948. Recall how rightwing figures have been using the Venona Papers to ahistorically argue that “Joe McCarthy was right!” even though the papers are filled with evidence of the opposite.
Notably, the key insight that led to the breaking of the Soviets’ codes was the realization that the Soviets had been misusing so-called one-time pads. This potentially very-low-tech approach to encryption also happens to be one of the known theoretically unbreakable methods of encryption still left. But there are a number of limitations to one-time pads including the fact that they must never be reused and must be kept completely secret to everyone but the communicating parties. Logistically, one-time pads are logistically difficult to implement, hence the Venona papers.
Nor are classic one-time pads usable for the internet. Instead, almost all communications today over modern communication networks are secured with a far more breakable form of encrypt: public key infrastructure (PKI), which was developed in the 1970s for encryption on a mass scale. And while PKI has been highly successful at delivering encryption to the masses that can’t be readily hacked using today’s technology, it came at an enormous cost. The kind of enormous cast that we have yet to pay. But the bill is coming. Potentially much sooner than almost anyone expects.
QD4 claims to have developed an advanced version of the one-time pad called the Q PAD, which it claims customers can use to conduct communications on existing networks that will remain uncrackable forever. Interestingly, the Q PAD also rely on quantum physics to accomplish this at a mass scale by utilizing special quantum random number generator chips and hardware that use quantum physics to generate truly random numbers. True randomization is one of the criteria for the one-time pad to provide unbreakable security.
So is the US government planning on turning to Q PAD technology for the US’s most sensitive communications going forward? Maybe, but it sounds like the US government already has a different approach in mind. Last year, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) chose four post-quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms, which some cyber experts believe will provide long-term security. The catch is that only some cyber experts agree with this. As we’ll see, others aren’t so sure and suspect even today’s classical non-quantum computers might be capable of breaking these algorithms.
Keep in mind a major difference between the Q PAD approach and these four new NIST-approved algorithms: the Q PAD is a physical device. These algorithms are just algorithms. No new hardware required. So could it be that the NIST’s ‘post-quantum’ algorithms really can withstand the brute force of a quantum computer attack? Let’s hope so, but it’s kind of hard to see how we can be assured without the existence of codebreaking quantum computers. And it doesn’t help that some experts are claiming these algorithms aren’t even ‘pre-quantum’ secure.
Beyond quantum computing, or quantum random number generating chips, there’s another application of quantum physics that’s already being developed that could enable a kind of post-quantum communication security: quantum networks. In particular, quantum networks that could be used to securely pass encryption keys. China has already developed a quantum network connecting the cities Beijing, Jinan, Shanghai and Hefei. Of course, China isn’t alone in this research. Recall how the US government’s Los Alamos lab revealed back in 2013 that it had been operating a quantum internet for over two years, allowing for the quantum dissemination of “one-time pads” over this network.
That’s the range of quantum-related developments covered in this fascinating Reuters piece. It’s the kind of update that warns of a strategically vital quantum race just around the corner, but hints at a race that isn’t just already underway but potentially secretly already won. Because, again, there’s no incentive to reveal a quantum codebreaking breakthrough. Quite the opposite. It might be a “harvest now, decrypt later” status quo. But it could already be “harvest now, quietly decrypt now”. Either way, it’s a matter of when, not if:
“QD5’s executive vice president, Tilo Kunz, told officials from the Defense Information Systems Agency that possibly as soon as 2025, the world would arrive at what has been dubbed “Q‑day,” the day when quantum computers make current encryption methods useless. Machines vastly more powerful than today’s fastest supercomputers would be capable of cracking the codes that protect virtually all modern communication, he told the agency, which is tasked with safeguarding the U.S. military’s communications.”
“Q‑day” as soon as 2025. Maybe later, but maybe just little more than a year away. That was the warning from Tilo Kunz, executive vice president of quantum computing firm QD5, to US defense officials. Along with the warning that a “harvest now, decrypt later” race is already underway in anticipation. As Kunz put it, “Everything that gets sent over public networks is at risk”:
As Kunz reminds us, this isn’t a hypothetical. That “harvest now, decrypt later” scenario is what the 37-year long Venona project was all about. Decades old intelligence may not be fresh, but that doesn’t mean its not invaluable. Notably, that success with the Venona project came via the realization that the Soviets were incorrectly implementing “one-time pads”, a method of pre-quantum encryption that, in theory, is unhackable if done correctly, even for quantum systems. It’s a potentially key piece of history given that, today, it appears that one-time pads are one of the few remaining options available for making today’s data resistant to future decryption. At the same time, the public key infrastructure (PKI) technology that’s become standard in the internet age is all going to be vulnerable to this kind of “harvesting”:
So we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that Kunz’s QD5 is developing a new advanced version of the one-time pad for use on existing non-quantum networks. Interestingly, this advanced one-time pad technology utilizes quantum technology, but only for the generation of truly random numbers, one of the one-time pad’s key requirements:
But QD5’s one-time pad technology doesn’t appear to tbe what the US government is planning on relying on in the face of this threat. Instead, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) selected four post-quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms intended to fulfill that role. The problem is, as Kunz points out, these PQCs may not actually be as unhackable as claimed. The threat isn’t just from future quantum computers. Even classical computers can potentially defeat these supposed post-quantum algorithms. In other words, the post-quantum algorithms appear to be based on difficult math problems, like PKIs, but are presumably much more difficult. But extremely difficult math problems are still hypothetically solvable, unlike a one-time pad for which there is no underlying problem to solve:
At the same time, China appears to have already successfully built its own theoretically unbreakable communication networks based on quantum key distribution (QKD) technology, allowing for the quantum distribution of encryption keys that can be shared with high confidence. The backbone of such a network already connects Beijing, Jinan, Shanghai and Hefei. Recall how the US government’s Los Alamos lab revealed back in 2013 that it had been operating a quantum internet for over two years, allowing for the quantum dissemination of “one-time pads” over this network. China obviously isn’t the only country building this kind of technology:
Finally, keep in mind that we shouldn’t exactly expect a grand announcement and fanfare when the various anticipated quantum breakthroughs are accomplished. At least not any breakthroughs in quantum codebreaking. Quite the opposite. Whoever comes up with that kind of technology is going to have an incentive to keep it as quiet as possible for as long as possible. While harvesting as much as possible:
This is a good time to ask the question: so was there possibly a massive secret breakthrough in quantum codebreaking in the period leading up to the Snowden affair? Because it’s hard not to notice how that event was centered around the public message that “if you encrypt, your data will remain safe”. Not, “if you encrypt, your data will remain safe for the next couple of decades or so, at best.”