by Mike Adams
August 20, 2012
from
NaturalNews Website
The U.S. government is making steady progress on a game-changing technology
that would give it the most powerful weapon ever devised in the realm of
cyber warfare and information dominance.
The weapon is called a "prime-factoring quantum
computer," and a small-scale version of the game-changing technology has
already been demonstrated by researchers at UC Santa Barbara, where
qubits - quantum bits of computational
potential - factored the number 15 into its prime factors three and five.
So what, you say? Can't any fifth grader do the same thing?
But hold on: Every digital encryption algorithm used today depends in the
extreme mathematical difficulty of factoring (the prime numbers of) very
large numbers. When you buy something on the internet, for example, your
credit card number is sent to the merchant using something called "SSL
encryption" which typically uses a 40-bit, 128-bit or sometimes even a
256-bit encryption algorithm.
Anyone who might intercept your web form data
would not be able to extract your credit card number unless they decrypted
your encrypted data. This task requires extraordinary computing power.
For example, using "military grade" 512-bit
encryption means that it would take a
supercomputer longer than the age of the known universe to decrypt your file
and expose your secrets.
This is why the U.S. military uses such
encryption. It's virtually unbreakable given today's computers.
But quantum computers have the spooky ability to process complex
decryption algorithms using what some
scientists believe are computational bits which coexist in an infinite
number of parallel universes. You feed the quantum computer a decryption
task, and it "calculates" the answer in all possible parallel universes.
The correct answer then emerges in this
universe, seemingly magically.
Quantum computing
...appears to break the laws of physics... yeah, it's
spooky
All this is very much a layman's description of the phenomenon of
quantum computing, by the way.
Physicists will get into far more detail about
how qubits might actually work... although technically, nobody really
understands quantum computing. The key thing to understand about quantum
computing is that a qubit can store its states of zero and one
simultaneously.
A collection of eight qubits can store 256
variations or "values" simultaneously, unlike a traditional silicon "bit"
which can only store one of 256 values at a time.
The upshot of all this, mathematically speaking, is that instead of
decryption algorithms being exponentially more complex as the number of
encryption digits increases, qubits allow decryption algorithms to process
the problem in so-called polynomial time, meaning the problem becomes
exponentially easier to solve. (Or, technically, it doesn't become
exponentially harder to solve as the number of encryption digits increases.)
The upshot is that a computational problem which would have required longer
than the age of the known universe can, with the help of a quantum computer,
be accomplished in minutes or even seconds.
"...We've shown that we can run a version of
Peter Shor's prime factoring algorithm on a solid state quantum
processor. This is really exciting and has never been done before," said
Erik Lucero, lead author of a paper outlining the success of quantum
computer factoring.
Shor's algorithm describes an efficient
mathematical approach for integer factorization - the foundation of
decryption algorithms.
As Wikipedia
explains:
If a quantum computer with a sufficient
number of qubits were to be constructed, Shor's algorithm could be used
to break public-key cryptography schemes such as the widely used RSA
scheme.
RSA is based on the assumption that
factoring large numbers is computationally infeasible. So far as is
known, this assumption is valid for classical (non-quantum) computers;
no classical algorithm is known that can factor in polynomial time.
However, Shor's algorithm shows that
factoring is efficient on a quantum computer, so a sufficiently large
quantum computer can break RSA. It was also a powerful motivator for the
design and construction of quantum computers and for the study of new
quantum computer algorithms.
Andrew Cleland, a physics professor who
also worked on the project,
added,
"We just need to scale up the size of this
processor to something much larger."
Imagine a government
that can break any code
That "scaling up" will be difficult, but its achievement is only a matter of
time.
Once it is achieved, this technology will almost
certainly be classified as a "matter of national security" and control of
the technology will be monopolized by the U.S. government.
The U.S. government, which already behaves like a criminal police state
entity which respects no human rights, civil rights
or even the Bill of Rights, will no doubt
use this technology to expand its domination both domestically and
internationally.
The U.S. government absolutely despises anyone
who leaks its own secrets - witness the
attempted arrest and incarceration of Wikileaks' Julian
Assange - but the government is deeply interested in everyone else's
secrets, of course.
It is already public knowledge that the U.S. government, via
the NSA, is spying on everyone's email, web
traffic, phone calls and search engine activity. But right now, people and
corporations which value privacy use encryption algorithms to send protected
files to recipients. Even the common utility
WinZip has an encryption component to
protect files.
Once the U.S. government achieves its quantum computer, it will be able to
open all encrypted files in mere seconds, reading all the secrets of those
who mistakenly think their files are impenetrable. This means citizens and
corporations will have no ability to keep secrets from the government in the
realm of digital information.
That's why quantum computing will be used as a weapon by the government
itself - a weapon that steals secrets which the government will then use to
threaten or blackmail its way into positions of yet more power.
That's what governments do, after all: Incessantly seek more power at any
cost.
The end of VPNs
Another element no one is talking about here is the end of so-called "Virtual
Private Networks" or VPNs.
These are secure "tunnels" across the internet,
where packets of data are passed publicly across the internet, but all such
packets are encrypted. For example, I use a VPN to access the NaturalNews
servers and control the web servers there.
Many corporations use VPNs to allow their employees to "telecommute" by
working from home. Even the military uses VPNs throughout its command and
control infrastructure.
Prime-factoring quantum computers make VPNs obsolete. There's nothing
"private" about a Virtual Private Network if the U.S. government can decrypt
your encryption key in a matter of seconds.
Suddenly, what used to be a secret is now being
read by intelligence operatives in Langley.
Retroactive decryption
Here's something else you've probably never heard about:
This prime-factoring computing power can be
applied retroactively to files you or your company might be sending
across the internet right now.
You see, the U.S. government is already saving
all your emails in a massive storage system... and that data storage is
about the take a quantum leap in capacity, if you'll excuse the pun.
A massive NSA "spy hub" is currently under
construction in Utah and is expected to be completed by September, 2013.
As WIRED
reported:
"Under construction by contractors with
top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built
for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is
the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade.
Its purpose: to intercept, decipher,
analyze, and store vast swaths of the world's communications as they zap
down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables
of international, foreign, and domestic networks.
The heavily fortified $2 billion center
should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers
and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of
communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell
phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data
trails - parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and
other digital "pocket litter."
It is, in some measure, the realization of
the "total information awareness" program created during the first term
of the Bush administration."
Right now, in 2012, the government can't
brute-force decrypt your files because that would take longer than the age
of the known universe.
But the government can save your files and hold
onto them until prime-factoring quantum computers become a reality -
something that looks to be only years away. At that point, the government
can then retroactively decrypt all the files it has been storing in its
NSA data
centers.
In other words, all the encrypted files you're sending around right now -
thinking they're bulletproof in terms of security - will eventually be
decrypted by the U.S. government with the help of a soon-to-exist quantum
computer.
Right now, then, the government is capturing all email attachments and
building a future "decryption queue" of files to be processed once the
quantum computers are up and running.
The scientists who are working on this project
may think they're advancing the cause of science, but what they're actually
doing is handing one of the world's most dangerous governments the "ultimate
information weapon" that can - and will - be used to crush freedom and
dissent.
Prepare for a world
with no privacy and no secrets
Imagine a world with no more secrets. That's what the U.S. government wants.
And with the aid of quantum computing, that world may soon become a reality.
We must all now ASSUME that whatever encrypted information or files we send
across the internet today will be decrypted by the government within a few
years.
Please plan accordingly.