

NSA: Still bound by laws of computational complexity - clarkm
http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1517

======
soora
"In cryptography, then, it’s not just for idle academic reasons that you’d
like a publicly-available trail of research papers and source code, open to
criticism and improvement by anyone, that takes you all the way from the
presumed hardness of an underlying mathematical problem to the security of
your system under whichever class of attacks is relevant to you."

Being open to criticism and improvement does not necessarily improve anything
unless the people doing the review have the same level of knowledge as the
people trying to leave exploitable flaws.

~~~
mindslight
While what you say isn't false per se, there still is no better avenue of
approach.

This is like the fifth time today that I'm seeing this sort of inward-looking
anti-intellectual sentiment. Was there some dimwitted reddit thread that led
to the consensus that since crypto is hard to understand, it's only for elites
and shouldn't be trusted? Or that we should throw away the ideas that open
development and the scientific method are our best tools for creating
foundations for progress?

Or maybe these newly created accounts are just NSA psyops attempting to
dissuade people away from the idea that the NSA can even be thwarted?

Sorry kids, these Snowden revelations are apparently hitting you quite hard as
you'd resigned yourselves to trusting one of corporations, the government, or
the populist mob and are shocked that the first two are colluding to undermine
the third. But for those who've been analyzing security all along, this news
is just confirmation of existing speculation and another opportunity to shout
from the rooftops to convince people that security matters.

