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Glen Greenwald: Don't Trust Anonymous Anti-Snowden Claims
Glen Greenwald casts a scathing look at the claims (such as by the Sunday Times) that Edward Snowden's leaked information had been cracked by Russian and Chinese spy agencies. Greenwald compares Snowden to some other public figures against whom underhanded tactics were employed by the U.S. government. A slice: There’s an anonymously made claim that Russia and China “cracked the top-secret cache of files” from Snowden’s, but there is literally zero evidence for that claim. These hidden officials also claim that American and British agents were unmasked and had to be rescued, but not a single one is identified. There is speculation that Russia and China learned things from obtaining the Snowden files, but how could these officials possibly know that, particularly since other government officials are constantly accusing both countries of successfully hacking sensitive government databases?
One of the whole points of an intelligence organisation is to know what the 'enemy' knows and how they got that information.
...and then make that information public? No, that's the propaganda department's job, and they don't usually care to validate the "information" they spread. Whenever a government makes a public claim to have proof of something and then refuses to make that proof public, they're LYING. Every single time.
So basically, we have no evidence, but there are reasons why we have no evidence so we should just trust the claims blindly.
No, *that* is a lack of understanding.
1) Plaintext attacks (or "knowing some of the decoded contents") are applicable only to some cyphers in some configurations.
2) With best currently known attack against AES-128 it'd take ~3000 billion years at 10^18 attempts per second. 2 years mean complete breakdown. Nobody said "realtime", DId you miss the talks about snooping and storing everything that might be of interest on the net? That data might be lying in cold storage for now, but if it's crackable in a reasonable timeframe, NSA and all the other agencies will be reading through it soon.