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Snowden’s Ride, Part 11: The “Deep Fifth Column”–Old Leaks Shed New Light on the Present

 

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 IPart IIPart IIIPart IVPart VPart VIPart VII, Part VIIIPart IXPart X, Part XI, Part XIIPart XIIIPart XIVPart XVPart 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. . . .

 

Discussion

5 comments for “Snowden’s Ride, Part 11: The “Deep Fifth Column”–Old Leaks Shed New Light on the Present”

  1. 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?

    Posted by Shibusa | August 13, 2013, 11:42 am
  2. 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

    Posted by TBd | August 14, 2013, 11:22 am
  3. 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.

    Posted by kelley | August 20, 2013, 8:26 am
  4. WTF?

    Edward Snow­den, Glenn Green­wald Chal­lenge Inde­pen­dent Sto­ry

    The Huff­in­g­ton Post | By Jack Mirkin­son
    Post­ed: 08/23/2013 8:07 am EDT | Updat­ed: 08/23/2013 11:01 am EDT

    NSA leak­er Edward Snow­den accused the British gov­ern­ment on Fri­day of leak­ing sen­si­tive mate­r­i­al to a news­pa­per he’d nev­er worked with, the Inde­pen­dent, and attribut­ing the mate­r­i­al to him — a charge the paper heat­ed­ly denied.

    The paper pub­lished an exclu­sive sto­ry about a secret British spy base in the Mid­dle East on the front of its Fri­day edi­tion. The sto­ry’s pres­ence there came as a sur­prise to media-watch­ers. Snow­den has only been known to have giv­en his mate­r­i­al to a hand­ful of jour­nal­ists and out­lets. The Inde­pen­dent isn’t one of them.

    The paper said that infor­ma­tion about the base was “con­tained in the leaked doc­u­ments” from Snow­den, but that the Guardian had “agreed to the Gov­ern­men­t’s request not to pub­lish any mate­r­i­al con­tained in the Snow­den doc­u­ments that could dam­age nation­al secu­ri­ty” and “agreed to restrict the news­pa­per’s report­ing of the doc­u­ments.”

    This led some observers to won­der whether the Guardian had passed mate­r­i­al to the Inde­pen­dent because it was being cen­sored by the gov­ern­ment.

    But the Guardian’s Glenn Green­wald, who has cov­ered many of the Snow­den-based scoops for the paper, wrote on Fri­day morn­ing that he was “not aware of, nor sub­ject to, any agree­ment that impos­es any lim­i­ta­tions of any kind on the report­ing that I am doing on these doc­u­ments.”

    He also pub­lished a state­ment from Snow­den say­ing that he had “nev­er spo­ken with, worked with, or pro­vid­ed any jour­nal­is­tic mate­ri­als to the Inde­pen­dent.”

    Snow­den said he thought the British were “seek­ing to cre­ate an appear­ance that the Guardian and Wash­ing­ton Post’s dis­clo­sures are harm­ful, and they are doing so by inten­tion­al­ly leak­ing harm­ful infor­ma­tion to The Inde­pen­dent and attribut­ing it to oth­ers.”

    In response, Oliv­er Wright, an edi­tor at the Inde­pen­dent, fired back in a state­ment sent to Huff­Post UK’s Jes­si­ca Elgot:

    “These alle­ga­tions are com­plete­ly untrue. The Inde­pen­dent was not leaked the sto­ry by the gov­ern­ment or duped into pub­lish­ing it by any­one. The lead byline is that of the high­ly respect­ed free­lance jour­nal­ist Dun­can Camp­bell, who has a 25 year track record of inves­ti­gat­ing state sur­veil­lance.

    Mr. Green­wald did not con­tact The Inde­pen­dent before pub­lish­ing his blog and does not appear to have any evi­dence to back up his asser­tions. He is now ask­ing that we pro­vide infor­ma­tion about our sources for the sto­ry which, as jour­nal­ist him­self, he should realise that we will not do.”

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | August 23, 2013, 1:33 pm
  5. 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:

    Reuters

    U.S. and Chi­na race to shield secrets from quan­tum com­put­ers

    The encryp­tion guard­ing dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tions could some­day be cracked by quan­tum com­put­ers. Dubbed ‘Q‑day,’ that moment could upend mil­i­tary and eco­nom­ic secu­ri­ty world­wide. Great pow­ers are sprint­ing to get there first.

    By DAVID LAGUE

    Filed Dec. 14, 2023, noon GMT

    In Feb­ru­ary, a Cana­di­an cyber­se­cu­ri­ty firm deliv­ered an omi­nous fore­cast to the U.S. Depart­ment of Defense. America’s secrets – actu­al­ly, everybody’s secrets – are now at risk of expo­sure, warned the team from Quan­tum Defen5e (QD5).

    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.

    In the mean­time, Kunz told the pan­el, a glob­al effort to plun­der data is under­way so that inter­cept­ed mes­sages can be decod­ed after Q‑day in what he described as “har­vest now, decrypt lat­er” attacks, accord­ing to a record­ing of the ses­sion the agency lat­er made pub­lic.

    Mil­i­taries would see their long-term plans and intel­li­gence gath­er­ing exposed to ene­mies. Busi­ness­es could have their intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty swiped. People’s health records would be laid bare.

    “We are not the only ones who are har­vest­ing, we are not the only ones hop­ing to decrypt that in the future,” Kunz said, with­out nam­ing names. “Every­thing that gets sent over pub­lic net­works is at risk.”

    Kunz is among a grow­ing cho­rus sound­ing this alarm. Many cyber experts believe all the major pow­ers are col­lect­ing ahead of Q‑day. The Unit­ed States and Chi­na, the world’s lead­ing mil­i­tary pow­ers, are accus­ing each oth­er of data har­vest­ing on a grand scale.

    The direc­tor of the Fed­er­al Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion, Christo­pher Wray, said in Sep­tem­ber that Chi­na had “a big­ger hack­ing pro­gram than every oth­er major nation com­bined.” In a Sep­tem­ber report, China’s chief civil­ian intel­li­gence agency, the Min­istry of State Secu­ri­ty, accused the U.S. Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency of “sys­tem­at­ic” attacks to steal Chi­nese data.

    ...

    More is at stake than crack­ing codes. Quan­tum com­put­ers, which har­ness the mys­te­ri­ous prop­er­ties of sub­atom­ic par­ti­cles, promise to deliv­er break­throughs in sci­ence, arma­ments and indus­try, researchers say. (See relat­ed sto­ry.)

    Opin­ion is divid­ed on the expect­ed arrival of Q‑day, to be sure. It’s still rel­a­tive­ly ear­ly days for quan­tum com­put­ing: So far, only small quan­tum com­put­ers with lim­it­ed pro­cess­ing pow­er and a vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty to error have been built. Some researchers esti­mate that Q‑day might come clos­er to the mid­dle of the cen­tu­ry.

    No one knows who might get there first. The Unit­ed States and Chi­na are con­sid­ered the lead­ers in the field; many experts believe Amer­i­ca still holds an edge.

    As the race to mas­ter quan­tum com­put­ing con­tin­ues, a scram­ble is on to pro­tect crit­i­cal data. Wash­ing­ton and its allies are work­ing on new encryp­tion stan­dards known as post-quan­tum cryp­tog­ra­phy – essen­tial­ly codes that are much hard­er to crack, even for a quan­tum com­put­er. Bei­jing is try­ing to pio­neer quan­tum com­mu­ni­ca­tions net­works, a tech­nol­o­gy the­o­ret­i­cal­ly impos­si­ble to hack, accord­ing to researchers. The sci­en­tist spear­head­ing Beijing’s efforts has become a minor celebri­ty in Chi­na.

    Quan­tum com­put­ing is rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent. Con­ven­tion­al com­put­ers process infor­ma­tion as bits – either 1 or 0, and just one num­ber at a time. Quan­tum com­put­ers process in quan­tum bits, or “qubits,” which can be 1, 0 or any num­ber in between, all at the same time, which physi­cists say is an approx­i­mate way of describ­ing a com­plex math­e­mat­i­cal con­cept.

    These com­put­ers also exploit a mys­te­ri­ous prop­er­ty of quan­tum mechan­ics known as entan­gle­ment. Par­ti­cles such as pho­tons or elec­trons can become entan­gled so that they remain con­nect­ed, even when sep­a­rat­ed by huge dis­tances. Changes in one par­ti­cle are imme­di­ate­ly reflect­ed in the oth­er. The prop­er­ties of qubits and entan­gle­ment are fun­da­men­tal to quan­tum com­put­ers, say physi­cists and com­put­er sci­en­tists, poten­tial­ly allow­ing cal­cu­la­tions to be car­ried out that would be imprac­ti­cal on today’s large super­com­put­ers.

    Busi­ness con­sul­tants fore­cast this pro­cess­ing pow­er will deliv­er hun­dreds of bil­lions of dol­lars in extra rev­enue by the mid­dle of the next decade. Even before these com­put­ers arrive, some are pre­dict­ing that advances in quan­tum tech­nol­o­gy will sharply improve the per­for­mance of some mil­i­tary hard­ware.

    Quan­tum tech­nol­o­gy “is like­ly to be as trans­for­ma­tion­al in the 21st cen­tu­ry as har­ness­ing elec­tric­i­ty as a resource was in the 19th cen­tu­ry,” said Michael Bier­cuk, founder and chief exec­u­tive offi­cer of Q‑CTRL, a quan­tum tech com­pa­ny that was estab­lished in Aus­tralia and has major oper­a­tions in the Unit­ed States.

    Crack­ing codes

    It was the code­break­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties of quan­tum com­put­ing that sparked the field’s surge in progress in recent decades, said Q‑CTRL’s Bier­cuk, an Amer­i­can who is a pro­fes­sor of quan­tum physics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Syd­ney and a for­mer con­sul­tant to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s inno­va­tion incu­ba­tor. The U.S. gov­ern­ment saw it as a “big oppor­tu­ni­ty ” in the 1990s and has been fund­ing research ever since, he said.

    In his brief­ing for the Pen­ta­gon, QD5’s Kunz cit­ed what he called one of the most suc­cess­ful har­vest now/decrypt lat­er oper­a­tions ever: the Venona project.

    Launched in 1943, Venona was a 37-year U.S. effort to deci­pher Sovi­et diplo­mat­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tions col­lect­ed by the Amer­i­cans dur­ing and after World War Two. U.S. code­break­ers, aid­ed by allies, were able to decrypt more than 2,900 cables from thou­sands of mes­sages sent by Sovi­et intel­li­gence agen­cies between 1940 and 1948, accord­ing to CIA doc­u­ments.

    The cables revealed exten­sive Com­mu­nist intel­li­gence oper­a­tions against the Unit­ed States and its allies. The code-crack­ing coup led to the dis­cov­ery of Sovi­et pen­e­tra­tion of the Man­hat­tan Project, the top-secret pro­gram to build the first atom­ic bombs, and the exis­tence of the Cam­bridge Five, a group of top British civ­il ser­vants spy­ing for Moscow, the CIA doc­u­ments show.

    The West’s break­through was the real­iza­tion that the Sovi­ets had mis­used so-called one-time pads: a time-test­ed form of encryp­tion in which a secret key is used to encode a mes­sage sent between par­ties. The method got its name because in its ear­li­est forms, keys were print­ed on a pad whose pages each con­tained a unique code; the top page was ripped off and destroyed after a sin­gle use. The Sovi­ets blun­dered by print­ing and using dupli­cate pages in one-time pads for a lim­it­ed time. This allowed allied ana­lysts to painstak­ing­ly decrypt some of the mes­sages years lat­er, accord­ing to the CIA doc­u­ments.

    To be tru­ly unbreak­able, cyber­se­cu­ri­ty experts say, a one-time-pad key must be a set of ran­dom num­bers equal to or big­ger than the size of the mes­sage – and used only once. The par­ty receiv­ing the mes­sage uses the same secret key to decrypt the mes­sage. The method was invent­ed more than a cen­tu­ry ago, and for decades was used for secret mes­sages by most major pow­ers. But tech­ni­cal fac­tors made it too unwieldy for mass, secure com­mu­ni­ca­tion in the mod­ern era.

    Instead, most com­mu­ni­ca­tions today are secured with what is known as pub­lic key infra­struc­ture (PKI), a sys­tem devel­oped in the 1970s to enable encryp­tion on a mass scale.

    PKI enabled the rise of the inter­net econ­o­my and open telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions sys­tems. The pass­words to email accounts, online bank­ing and secure mes­sag­ing plat­forms all rely on it. PKI is also crit­i­cal to most gov­ern­ment and nation­al secu­ri­ty com­mu­ni­ca­tions.

    Secu­ri­ty pro­vid­ed by PKI stems essen­tial­ly from hid­ing infor­ma­tion behind a very dif­fi­cult math prob­lem, Bier­cuk said. The most wide­ly used algo­rithm that cre­ates and man­ages that dif­fi­cult math prob­lem used for encryp­tion is known as RSA, from the sur­name ini­tials of its inven­tors: the com­put­er sci­en­tists and cryp­tog­ra­phers Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adel­man. What may be about to change is that these prob­lems will be a cinch for quan­tum com­put­ers to solve.

    “If you have a com­put­er for which that math prob­lem is not very hard,” Bier­cuk said, “all of that is at risk.”

    Mon­tre­al-based QD5, the pri­vate­ly held com­pa­ny where Kunz is exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent, is tak­ing a dif­fer­ent approach to post-quan­tum cryp­tog­ra­phy. It has devel­oped an advanced ver­sion of the one-time pad: a device, the Q PAD, which it claims cus­tomers can use to con­duct com­mu­ni­ca­tions on exist­ing net­works that will remain uncrack­able for­ev­er. Pen­ta­gon offi­cials pep­pered Kunz and col­leagues with tech­ni­cal ques­tions about the tech­nol­o­gy in Feb­ru­ary, but not­ed the infor­ma­tion­al ses­sion didn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly sig­nal an intent to buy the Q PAD sys­tem.

    ...

    In an inter­view, Kunz, a for­mer Cana­di­an sol­dier, said he first learned about one-time pads while serv­ing with a recon­nais­sance unit.

    “It is very sim­ple and straight­for­ward,” he said. “Every time you used one of those sheets of paper, you would have to destroy it. If you only have those two keys, and fol­low the rules,” a mes­sage may be inter­cept­ed, but the ene­my “will nev­er be able to break it.”

    QD5 has over­come some of the lim­i­ta­tions of the orig­i­nal one-time pad, said Chief Tech­nol­o­gy Offi­cer Gary Swat­ton. One hur­dle to mass use of the method was the need to gen­er­ate enough sets of tru­ly ran­dom num­bers to sup­ply mod­ern com­mu­ni­ca­tions net­works with encryp­tion. Before quan­tum tech­nolo­gies emerged, this took con­sid­er­able time and effort.

    Now, spe­cial­ly designed semi­con­duc­tor chips and hard­ware, called quan­tum ran­dom num­ber gen­er­a­tors, can exploit the tru­ly ran­dom nature of sub­atom­ic quan­tum par­ti­cles to gen­er­ate num­ber sets in large vol­umes, accord­ing to researchers. “Tech­nol­o­gy has caught up and is solv­ing these prob­lems,” Swat­ton said.

    Oth­er com­pa­nies hope to seize on demand for bet­ter secu­ri­ty. Sand­box­AQ of Tar­ry­town, New York, a spin-off from Google own­er Alpha­bet, has a divi­sion to help clients tack­le the threat from quan­tum com­put­ing and lever­age the ben­e­fits of this pow­er­ful tech­nol­o­gy. Even if Q‑day is a decade or more away, “it’s imper­a­tive that orga­ni­za­tions begin prepar­ing for the migra­tion to post-quan­tum cryp­tog­ra­phy now,” said Marc Man­zano, SandboxAQ’s gen­er­al man­ag­er of quan­tum secu­ri­ty.

    Some antic­i­pate upheaval. Skip Sanz­eri, founder and chief oper­at­ing offi­cer of quan­tum secu­ri­ty com­pa­ny QuSe­cure in San Mateo, Cal­i­for­nia, says “the entire inter­net and the devices con­nect­ed to it” will be affect­ed. The World Eco­nom­ic Forum has esti­mat­ed that 20 bil­lion devices will have to be upgrad­ed or replaced to meet quan­tum secu­ri­ty stan­dards in the next two decades.

    “This is going to be a $100 bil­lion or tril­lion-dol­lar upgrade,” Sanz­eri says.

    While quan­tum com­put­ing threat­ens to upend exist­ing secu­ri­ty mea­sures, the physics behind this tech­nol­o­gy could also be exploit­ed to build the­o­ret­i­cal­ly unhack­able net­works.

    In a quan­tum com­mu­ni­ca­tions net­work, users exchange a secret key or code on sub­atom­ic par­ti­cles called pho­tons, allow­ing them to encrypt and decrypt data. This is called quan­tum key dis­tri­b­u­tion, or QKD. It is one of the fun­da­men­tal prop­er­ties of quan­tum mechan­ics that can ensure secure com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Any attempt to mon­i­tor or inter­fere with these quan­tum par­ti­cles changes them, physi­cists explain. That means any attempt to inter­cept the com­mu­ni­ca­tions is imme­di­ate­ly detectable to users. If the com­mu­ni­cat­ing par­ties receive an uncor­rupt­ed encryp­tion key, they can be con­fi­dent that their sub­se­quent com­mu­ni­ca­tions will be secure.

    With quan­tum net­works, “our tech­ni­cal secu­ri­ty comes from the laws of physics,” says physi­cist Gre­goire Ribor­dy, chief exec­u­tive offi­cer of ID Quan­tique (IDQ), a pri­vate­ly held Swiss com­pa­ny that pro­vides quan­tum com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­o­gy. “Inter­cep­tion of the com­mu­ni­ca­tions is just not pos­si­ble with­out leav­ing a trace.”

    China’s big bet

    Quan­tum com­mu­ni­ca­tions is an area where Chi­na is spend­ing big. The tech­nol­o­gy has the poten­tial to safe­guard Beijing’s data net­works, even if Wash­ing­ton and oth­er rivals are first to reach Q‑day.

    Pres­i­dent Xi Jin­ping stressed the “strate­gic val­ue” of quan­tum tech­nol­o­gy in a 2020 speech to top Chi­nese lead­ers, the offi­cial Xin­hua news agency report­ed. Under Xi, Chi­na has set clear tar­gets to dom­i­nate quan­tum sci­ence. It is spend­ing more than any oth­er coun­try on quan­tum research by some esti­mates. In an April report, McK­in­sey & Com­pa­ny esti­mat­ed that Bei­jing had announced a cumu­la­tive $15.3 bil­lion in fund­ing for quan­tum research, more than quadru­ple the equiv­a­lent U.S. fig­ure of $3.7 bil­lion.

    A key dri­ver of China’s quan­tum tech quest is Pan Jian­wei, a physi­cist who has achieved celebri­ty sta­tus in Chi­na along with praise and sup­port from the rul­ing Com­mu­nist Par­ty.

    Pan, 53, is a pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy of Chi­na, the country’s pre­mier quan­tum research out­fit. In 2011, he was elect­ed to the Chi­nese Acad­e­my of Sci­ences, an hon­or giv­en to sci­en­tists who have made impor­tant advances in their fields.

    Pan in media inter­views has said he wants to make Chi­na a leader in quan­tum tech­nol­o­gy while build­ing an inter­net secure from cyber­at­tacks. This would serve vital strate­gic pur­pos­es, secu­ri­ty experts say. It would pro­tect the Chi­nese lead­er­ship and mil­i­tary from hack­ing, espe­cial­ly in a con­flict. A quan­tum-for­ti­fied inter­net could pro­tect vital infra­struc­ture and the vast sur­veil­lance net­work the Com­mu­nist Par­ty has built to stamp out any chal­lenge to its monop­oly on pow­er, they say.

    ...

    Pan’s career high­lights how the absorp­tion of for­eign tech­nol­o­gy has been cru­cial to Chi­na in quan­tum and oth­er tech fields.

    He stud­ied for his doc­tor­ate in Vien­na with renowned physi­cist Anton Zeilinger. Zeilinger shared the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on quan­tum mechan­ics. Pan lat­er moved to the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hei­del­berg, where he still main­tains close links, before return­ing home in 2008.

    ...

    Back in Chi­na, Pan led a team that record­ed a mile­stone in 2016 with the launch of Micius, the world’s first quan­tum satel­lite, which was used to estab­lish secure com­mu­ni­ca­tions links with ground sta­tions in Chi­na.

    The fol­low­ing year, his team and researchers in Aus­tria used Micius to hold the world’s first quan­tum-encrypt­ed tele­con­fer­ence, con­nect­ing Bei­jing and Vien­na. Pan also led a team that has report­ed­ly built a sim­i­lar­ly unhack­able ground-based net­work in Chi­na link­ing the cities of Bei­jing, Jinan, Shang­hai and Hefei.

    Pan was one of the archi­tects of a con­cert­ed cam­paign to deploy Chi­nese sci­en­tists to lead­ing quan­tum labs around the world, with the goal of jump-start­ing domes­tic devel­op­ment when these researchers returned home, accord­ing to a 2019 report by Strid­er Tech­nolo­gies, a Salt Lake City-based strate­gic intel­li­gence start­up.

    Some of those researchers, includ­ing Pan, ben­e­fit­ed from sub­stan­tial for­eign gov­ern­ment fund­ing while study­ing abroad, the report found. “From that regard it has been wild­ly suc­cess­ful,” Strid­er Tech­nolo­gies Chief Exec­u­tive Offi­cer Greg Levesque said of the Chi­nese strat­e­gy in an inter­view with Reuters. “But I don’t know if they are going to win it,” he added. “It seems some U.S. com­pa­nies are mak­ing some real­ly big leaps.”

    Despite China’s appar­ent lead in offi­cial fund­ing, some researchers say Amer­i­ca remains the over­all quan­tum leader thanks to its pri­vate sec­tor tech­nol­o­gy inno­va­tors, gov­ern­ment labs, uni­ver­si­ty researchers and col­lab­o­rat­ing allies. And Wash­ing­ton is mov­ing to restrict U.S. invest­ment in China’s quan­tum capa­bil­i­ties.

    In August, Pres­i­dent Joe Biden signed an exec­u­tive order direct­ing the U.S. Depart­ment of the Trea­sury to reg­u­late U.S. invest­ments in quan­tum com­put­ing, semi­con­duc­tors and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. An annex to that order named Chi­na as a coun­try of con­cern, along with its spe­cial admin­is­tra­tive regions of Hong Kong and Macau. That could lead to bans on invest­ment in Chi­nese pro­duc­tion of quan­tum tech­nolo­gies and equip­ment.

    ...

    New secu­ri­ty era

    Glob­al­ly, gov­ern­ment secu­ri­ty agen­cies and the pri­vate sec­tor are work­ing on strate­gies to beat quan­tum com­put­ers. In August, the U.S. Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency and oth­er agen­cies urged the pub­lic and com­pa­nies to adopt new mea­sures to safe­guard their com­mu­ni­ca­tions with post-quan­tum cryp­tog­ra­phy.

    After exten­sive eval­u­a­tion, the U.S. Nation­al Insti­tute of Stan­dards and Tech­nol­o­gy (NIST) last year select­ed four so-called post-quan­tum cryp­tog­ra­phy (PQC) algo­rithms – new encryp­tion stan­dards that some cyber experts believe will pro­vide long-term secu­ri­ty. U.S. gov­ern­ment agen­cies next year are expect­ed to issue a new stan­dard for post-quan­tum cryp­tog­ra­phy, Biden dis­closed in a May memo. NIST said in August that it’s work­ing on stan­dard­iz­ing these algo­rithms, the final step before mak­ing these tools wide­ly avail­able for orga­ni­za­tions to upgrade their encryp­tion.

    SandboxAQ’s Man­zano said his com­pa­ny is work­ing with some of the world’s biggest com­pa­nies and gov­ern­ment agen­cies to inte­grate the com­ing PQC cryp­tog­ra­phy algo­rithms into their sys­tems. Sanz­eri said QuSe­cure, too, is work­ing with gov­ern­ment and pri­vate clients to upgrade to PQC.

    Not every­one agrees the new algo­rithms will offer reli­able secu­ri­ty. Kunz told Reuters that even­tu­al­ly the new cyphers could be com­pro­mised as quan­tum com­put­ers improve. “The prob­lem is that PQC is not unbreak­able,” he said. “It does not solve the har­vest now, decrypt lat­er prob­lem.”

    IDQ’s Ribor­dy said that today’s clas­si­cal com­put­ers also might be able to crack these new codes. The com­plex math prob­lems at the heart of PQC are “so new” that they have not been stud­ied very exten­sive­ly, he not­ed.

    A spokesper­son for NIST said the agency “has con­fi­dence in the secu­ri­ty of the PQC algo­rithms select­ed for stan­dard­iza­tion, (or) else we wouldn’t be stan­dard­iz­ing them. The algo­rithms have been stud­ied by experts, and went through an inten­sive eval­u­a­tion process.” He added that it was not inevitable or even a “safe assump­tion” that they would be bro­ken.

    ...

    In the mean­time, one chal­lenge for the keep­ers of dig­i­tal secrets is that when­ev­er Q‑day comes, quan­tum code­break­ers are unlike­ly to announce their break­through. Instead, they’re like­ly to keep qui­et, so they can exploit the advan­tage as long as pos­si­ble.

    “We won’t nec­es­sar­i­ly know” when the codes are bro­ken, Kunz told the Pen­ta­gon pan­el. “We will prob­a­bly find out the hard way,” he said. “But what we can expect is that they will be bro­ken.”

    ————

    “U.S. and Chi­na race to shield secrets from quan­tum com­put­ers” By DAVID LAGUE; Reuters; 12/14/2023

    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”:

    ...
    In the mean­time, Kunz told the pan­el, a glob­al effort to plun­der data is under­way so that inter­cept­ed mes­sages can be decod­ed after Q‑day in what he described as “har­vest now, decrypt lat­er” attacks, accord­ing to a record­ing of the ses­sion the agency lat­er made pub­lic.

    Mil­i­taries would see their long-term plans and intel­li­gence gath­er­ing exposed to ene­mies. Busi­ness­es could have their intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty swiped. People’s health records would be laid bare.

    “We are not the only ones who are har­vest­ing, we are not the only ones hop­ing to decrypt that in the future,” Kunz said, with­out nam­ing names. “Every­thing that gets sent over pub­lic net­works is at risk.”

    Kunz is among a grow­ing cho­rus sound­ing this alarm. Many cyber experts believe all the major pow­ers are col­lect­ing ahead of Q‑day. The Unit­ed States and Chi­na, the world’s lead­ing mil­i­tary pow­ers, are accus­ing each oth­er of data har­vest­ing on a grand scale.

    ...

    Opin­ion is divid­ed on the expect­ed arrival of Q‑day, to be sure. It’s still rel­a­tive­ly ear­ly days for quan­tum com­put­ing: So far, only small quan­tum com­put­ers with lim­it­ed pro­cess­ing pow­er and a vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty to error have been built. Some researchers esti­mate that Q‑day might come clos­er to the mid­dle of the cen­tu­ry.

    No one knows who might get there first. The Unit­ed States and Chi­na are con­sid­ered the lead­ers in the field; many experts believe Amer­i­ca still holds an edge.
    ...

    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”:

    ...
    In his brief­ing for the Pen­ta­gon, QD5’s Kunz cit­ed what he called one of the most suc­cess­ful har­vest now/decrypt lat­er oper­a­tions ever: the Venona project.

    Launched in 1943, Venona was a 37-year U.S. effort to deci­pher Sovi­et diplo­mat­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tions col­lect­ed by the Amer­i­cans dur­ing and after World War Two. U.S. code­break­ers, aid­ed by allies, were able to decrypt more than 2,900 cables from thou­sands of mes­sages sent by Sovi­et intel­li­gence agen­cies between 1940 and 1948, accord­ing to CIA doc­u­ments.

    The cables revealed exten­sive Com­mu­nist intel­li­gence oper­a­tions against the Unit­ed States and its allies. The code-crack­ing coup led to the dis­cov­ery of Sovi­et pen­e­tra­tion of the Man­hat­tan Project, the top-secret pro­gram to build the first atom­ic bombs, and the exis­tence of the Cam­bridge Five, a group of top British civ­il ser­vants spy­ing for Moscow, the CIA doc­u­ments show.

    The West’s break­through was the real­iza­tion that the Sovi­ets had mis­used so-called one-time pads: a time-test­ed form of encryp­tion in which a secret key is used to encode a mes­sage sent between par­ties. The method got its name because in its ear­li­est forms, keys were print­ed on a pad whose pages each con­tained a unique code; the top page was ripped off and destroyed after a sin­gle use. The Sovi­ets blun­dered by print­ing and using dupli­cate pages in one-time pads for a lim­it­ed time. This allowed allied ana­lysts to painstak­ing­ly decrypt some of the mes­sages years lat­er, accord­ing to the CIA doc­u­ments.

    To be tru­ly unbreak­able, cyber­se­cu­ri­ty experts say, a one-time-pad key must be a set of ran­dom num­bers equal to or big­ger than the size of the mes­sage – and used only once. The par­ty receiv­ing the mes­sage uses the same secret key to decrypt the mes­sage. The method was invent­ed more than a cen­tu­ry ago, and for decades was used for secret mes­sages by most major pow­ers. But tech­ni­cal fac­tors made it too unwieldy for mass, secure com­mu­ni­ca­tion in the mod­ern era.

    Instead, most com­mu­ni­ca­tions today are secured with what is known as pub­lic key infra­struc­ture (PKI), a sys­tem devel­oped in the 1970s to enable encryp­tion on a mass scale.

    PKI enabled the rise of the inter­net econ­o­my and open telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions sys­tems. The pass­words to email accounts, online bank­ing and secure mes­sag­ing plat­forms all rely on it. PKI is also crit­i­cal to most gov­ern­ment and nation­al secu­ri­ty com­mu­ni­ca­tions.

    Secu­ri­ty pro­vid­ed by PKI stems essen­tial­ly from hid­ing infor­ma­tion behind a very dif­fi­cult math prob­lem, Bier­cuk said. The most wide­ly used algo­rithm that cre­ates and man­ages that dif­fi­cult math prob­lem used for encryp­tion is known as RSA, from the sur­name ini­tials of its inven­tors: the com­put­er sci­en­tists and cryp­tog­ra­phers Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adel­man. What may be about to change is that these prob­lems will be a cinch for quan­tum com­put­ers to solve.

    “If you have a com­put­er for which that math prob­lem is not very hard,” Bier­cuk said, “all of that is at risk.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Mon­tre­al-based QD5, the pri­vate­ly held com­pa­ny where Kunz is exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent, is tak­ing a dif­fer­ent approach to post-quan­tum cryp­tog­ra­phy. It has devel­oped an advanced ver­sion of the one-time pad: a device, the Q PAD, which it claims cus­tomers can use to con­duct com­mu­ni­ca­tions on exist­ing net­works that will remain uncrack­able for­ev­er. Pen­ta­gon offi­cials pep­pered Kunz and col­leagues with tech­ni­cal ques­tions about the tech­nol­o­gy in Feb­ru­ary, but not­ed the infor­ma­tion­al ses­sion didn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly sig­nal an intent to buy the Q PAD sys­tem.

    ...

    In an inter­view, Kunz, a for­mer Cana­di­an sol­dier, said he first learned about one-time pads while serv­ing with a recon­nais­sance unit.

    “It is very sim­ple and straight­for­ward,” he said. “Every time you used one of those sheets of paper, you would have to destroy it. If you only have those two keys, and fol­low the rules,” a mes­sage may be inter­cept­ed, but the ene­my “will nev­er be able to break it.”

    QD5 has over­come some of the lim­i­ta­tions of the orig­i­nal one-time pad, said Chief Tech­nol­o­gy Offi­cer Gary Swat­ton. One hur­dle to mass use of the method was the need to gen­er­ate enough sets of tru­ly ran­dom num­bers to sup­ply mod­ern com­mu­ni­ca­tions net­works with encryp­tion. Before quan­tum tech­nolo­gies emerged, this took con­sid­er­able time and effort.

    Now, spe­cial­ly designed semi­con­duc­tor chips and hard­ware, called quan­tum ran­dom num­ber gen­er­a­tors, can exploit the tru­ly ran­dom nature of sub­atom­ic quan­tum par­ti­cles to gen­er­ate num­ber sets in large vol­umes, accord­ing to researchers. “Tech­nol­o­gy has caught up and is solv­ing these prob­lems,” Swat­ton said.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    As the race to mas­ter quan­tum com­put­ing con­tin­ues, a scram­ble is on to pro­tect crit­i­cal data. Wash­ing­ton and its allies are work­ing on new encryp­tion stan­dards known as post-quan­tum cryp­tog­ra­phy – essen­tial­ly codes that are much hard­er to crack, even for a quan­tum com­put­er. Bei­jing is try­ing to pio­neer quan­tum com­mu­ni­ca­tions net­works, a tech­nol­o­gy the­o­ret­i­cal­ly impos­si­ble to hack, accord­ing to researchers. The sci­en­tist spear­head­ing Beijing’s efforts has become a minor celebri­ty in Chi­na.

    ...

    Glob­al­ly, gov­ern­ment secu­ri­ty agen­cies and the pri­vate sec­tor are work­ing on strate­gies to beat quan­tum com­put­ers. In August, the U.S. Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency and oth­er agen­cies urged the pub­lic and com­pa­nies to adopt new mea­sures to safe­guard their com­mu­ni­ca­tions with post-quan­tum cryp­tog­ra­phy.

    After exten­sive eval­u­a­tion, the U.S. Nation­al Insti­tute of Stan­dards and Tech­nol­o­gy (NIST) last year select­ed four so-called post-quan­tum cryp­tog­ra­phy (PQC) algo­rithms – new encryp­tion stan­dards that some cyber experts believe will pro­vide long-term secu­ri­ty. U.S. gov­ern­ment agen­cies next year are expect­ed to issue a new stan­dard for post-quan­tum cryp­tog­ra­phy, Biden dis­closed in a May memo. NIST said in August that it’s work­ing on stan­dard­iz­ing these algo­rithms, the final step before mak­ing these tools wide­ly avail­able for orga­ni­za­tions to upgrade their encryp­tion.

    SandboxAQ’s Man­zano said his com­pa­ny is work­ing with some of the world’s biggest com­pa­nies and gov­ern­ment agen­cies to inte­grate the com­ing PQC cryp­tog­ra­phy algo­rithms into their sys­tems. Sanz­eri said QuSe­cure, too, is work­ing with gov­ern­ment and pri­vate clients to upgrade to PQC.

    Not every­one agrees the new algo­rithms will offer reli­able secu­ri­ty. Kunz told Reuters that even­tu­al­ly the new cyphers could be com­pro­mised as quan­tum com­put­ers improve. “The prob­lem is that PQC is not unbreak­able,” he said. “It does not solve the har­vest now, decrypt lat­er prob­lem.”

    IDQ’s Ribor­dy said that today’s clas­si­cal com­put­ers also might be able to crack these new codes. The com­plex math prob­lems at the heart of PQC are “so new” that they have not been stud­ied very exten­sive­ly, he not­ed.

    A spokesper­son for NIST said the agency “has con­fi­dence in the secu­ri­ty of the PQC algo­rithms select­ed for stan­dard­iza­tion, (or) else we wouldn’t be stan­dard­iz­ing them. The algo­rithms have been stud­ied by experts, and went through an inten­sive eval­u­a­tion process.” He added that it was not inevitable or even a “safe assump­tion” that they would be bro­ken.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    While quan­tum com­put­ing threat­ens to upend exist­ing secu­ri­ty mea­sures, the physics behind this tech­nol­o­gy could also be exploit­ed to build the­o­ret­i­cal­ly unhack­able net­works.

    In a quan­tum com­mu­ni­ca­tions net­work, users exchange a secret key or code on sub­atom­ic par­ti­cles called pho­tons, allow­ing them to encrypt and decrypt data. This is called quan­tum key dis­tri­b­u­tion, or QKD. It is one of the fun­da­men­tal prop­er­ties of quan­tum mechan­ics that can ensure secure com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Any attempt to mon­i­tor or inter­fere with these quan­tum par­ti­cles changes them, physi­cists explain. That means any attempt to inter­cept the com­mu­ni­ca­tions is imme­di­ate­ly detectable to users. If the com­mu­ni­cat­ing par­ties receive an uncor­rupt­ed encryp­tion key, they can be con­fi­dent that their sub­se­quent com­mu­ni­ca­tions will be secure.

    With quan­tum net­works, “our tech­ni­cal secu­ri­ty comes from the laws of physics,” says physi­cist Gre­goire Ribor­dy, chief exec­u­tive offi­cer of ID Quan­tique (IDQ), a pri­vate­ly held Swiss com­pa­ny that pro­vides quan­tum com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­o­gy. “Inter­cep­tion of the com­mu­ni­ca­tions is just not pos­si­ble with­out leav­ing a trace.”

    ...

    Back in Chi­na, Pan led a team that record­ed a mile­stone in 2016 with the launch of Micius, the world’s first quan­tum satel­lite, which was used to estab­lish secure com­mu­ni­ca­tions links with ground sta­tions in Chi­na.

    The fol­low­ing year, his team and researchers in Aus­tria used Micius to hold the world’s first quan­tum-encrypt­ed tele­con­fer­ence, con­nect­ing Bei­jing and Vien­na. Pan also led a team that has report­ed­ly built a sim­i­lar­ly unhack­able ground-based net­work in Chi­na link­ing the cities of Bei­jing, Jinan, Shang­hai and Hefei.

    Pan was one of the archi­tects of a con­cert­ed cam­paign to deploy Chi­nese sci­en­tists to lead­ing quan­tum labs around the world, with the goal of jump-start­ing domes­tic devel­op­ment when these researchers returned home, accord­ing to a 2019 report by Strid­er Tech­nolo­gies, a Salt Lake City-based strate­gic intel­li­gence start­up.

    Some of those researchers, includ­ing Pan, ben­e­fit­ed from sub­stan­tial for­eign gov­ern­ment fund­ing while study­ing abroad, the report found. “From that regard it has been wild­ly suc­cess­ful,” Strid­er Tech­nolo­gies Chief Exec­u­tive Offi­cer Greg Levesque said of the Chi­nese strat­e­gy in an inter­view with Reuters. “But I don’t know if they are going to win it,” he added. “It seems some U.S. com­pa­nies are mak­ing some real­ly big leaps.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    In the mean­time, one chal­lenge for the keep­ers of dig­i­tal secrets is that when­ev­er Q‑day comes, quan­tum code­break­ers are unlike­ly to announce their break­through. Instead, they’re like­ly to keep qui­et, so they can exploit the advan­tage as long as pos­si­ble.

    “We won’t nec­es­sar­i­ly know” when the codes are bro­ken, Kunz told the Pen­ta­gon pan­el. “We will prob­a­bly find out the hard way,” he said. “But what we can expect is that they will be bro­ken.”
    ...

    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.”

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | December 20, 2023, 4:02 pm

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