Slashdot Mirror
EU To Counter Echelon With Quantum Cryptography?
jfruhlinger writes "An article on Security.ITWorld.com seems to outline a coming information arms race. The European Union has decided to respond to the Echelon project by funding research into supposedly unbreakable quantum cryptography that will keep EU data out of Echelon's maw. Leaving aside the question of whether such a thing is possible, the political implications are troubling, indicating a widening rift within the Western world. Interestingly, the UK is part of the EU, but its intelligence services are among Echelon's sponsors."
True, it can't possibly be disturbing that the EU does not want the US spying on them after the US misused the trust completely during incidents like the Airbus/Boeing scandal.
You can't possibly question the motives of a country trying to protect against spies from friendly countries, when those friendly countries actually ARE spying on them.
Is this just 'security through obscurity', or was there something else involved.
I'm a pro-European, but we have to make the EU more democratic. The fact is that the members of the EU have already given up large amounts of their national sovereignty (because EU members must implement EU directives). This in itself is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as EU law is created by democratically elected representatives at the European supra-national level.
I have a feeling, if the population get a say, we will be out of Europe completely, the gates of the country will be shut, and the key thrown away. The British public is controlled by the gutter press (Mail, Times, Express, Sun) who are all vehemently Euro-sceptic. Well, controlled is too strong a word, but all the stories in those papers are anti-EU, anti-immigrant, anti-everything except good ole British values, like taking over half of the world.
And calling Britian the 51st state is just wrong. For a start, most of us object to the US, and so do most of the Foreign Office. The sympathy to the US is due to long standing ties, like us running you, and the fact we speak the same language. We try and imagine ourself as a bridge between the two continents. Not that that really works...
Treason doth never prosper. What's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.
This is only true using a full-keyspace brute force attack. The NSA was at least 20 years ahead of the academic world in discovering linear cryptanalysis. This is why they asked IBM to change the sboxes in DES, but wouldn't say why. The result was that DES was using an sbox from a fairly small subset of possible sboxes that resist linear cryptanalysis, but we didn't know it for another couple decades. Imagine for a minute that the NSA had a technique that cut the effective key size by a factor of 4. You can brute force attack that. There might even be polynomial algorithms for it, taking advantage of mathematical properties that only the largest employer of mathematicians in the world knows about.
We can't even be certain that the NSA doesn't have quantum computers, although this is less likely. When your attacker has a non-deterministic computer, you're fairly screwed on finding an algorithm that can be efficiently encoded and decoded on deterministic machines while taking extraordinarily long to decrypt without the key. The only saving grace here is that a quantum computer may not be a general non-deterministic machine, so there may be some things that a non-deterministic machine can do that a quantum computer cannot. To my knowledge, the equivalence between quantum computers and non-deterministic machines has not been proven either positively or negatively. I'm sure the NSA knows though.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Tony wants to be at the centre of the EU, and so do the Lib Dems. I've no idea what the official Tory line is this week, nor how many of them support it, but there's a very solid majority in the House of Commons pushing a pro-EU agenda.
And the UK isn't spying on us?
From what I understand they are, but its scarier than you think. The US is not, in many instances, allowed to spy on its own citizens, so it makes use of any ally to do it for them. This means they get round any privacy issues. In return the US spies on the UK to give the UK information on their own citizens.
This based on what I have been told. If anyone has anything to prove or disprove this, please share here.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I remember over a decade ago when I actually worked in a business in which we were espionage aware, that the number one espionage problem in the US was the French (followed by the Chinese, and then a laundry list of European countries -- including the UK), the French being primarily interested in stealing US weapons technology and listening in on business deals they were competing with. Which was primarily a business move; along with the Russians and the US, the French are one of the world's major arms exporting countries and they have to compete with US designed weapons on the open market.
Everyone spies on everyone, and for varying reasons. The French actually used to have one of the most aggressive intelligence services on the globe, disproportionate to their size and geopolitical importance, which some people find surprising. I don't know if it as large today, though. But this is nothing new, and all the governments understand that this goes on. As long as it doesn't get out of hand, it is tolerated between countries that are nominally friendly.