> This indicates to me that top secret technology is probably somewhere around 15-20 years ahead of what the general public knows about.
Err, maybe in optics at the time, but you can't just generalize like this. You can't consistently be ahead of everything all the time. More than likely the NSA suffers under Moore's law like everyone else.
I wouldn't be that sure. The NSA made DES _more_ secure in the 1970s by influencing IBMs design of the S-Boxes, regular cryptography research didn't even discover this until 1992.
This means that the NSA understood differential cryptanalysis 22 years before non-NSA researchers did. Their ability to brute force is meaningless if they have techniques to obviate it's necessity.
Err, maybe in optics at the time, but you can't just generalize like this. You can't consistently be ahead of everything all the time. More than likely the NSA suffers under Moore's law like everyone else.