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Comment by strictnein | Hacker News Reader

In 15-20 years I really hope a book comes out about the NSA's quantum computing work in this decade. I'm immensely curious to know how far they are/are not ahead of the Google/IBM/D-wave crowd.

They pretty obviously haven't recreated the magical chip from Sneakers yet (I think), but are they close? Or maybe they are there, but they have to be so very careful with how they use it so not to reveal its existence?

Or maybe they're far enough along to realize that's not a thing that can be built in this century?

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My guess is they aren't far ahead which explains why they are constantly telling companies to not encrypt data. The reality is they've spend billions developing a "super weapon" of mass surveillance and that entire system is heavily reliant on people not using effective encryption and companies willingly handing over data or creating backdoors.

I agree, this is the simplest and most likely explanation. As tempting as it is to buy into the romantic idea that they’re 100 years ahead of everyone else but can only use their powers in extreme circumstances, that just seems very unlikely.

The funny thing is even if they did have that they would still be as useless for their claimed function given the sheer haystack of communication and simple opsec and signals making it impossible to decode from the context.

A terrorist saying "Say hello to grandma for me." Could mean cancel/start/delay the attack or it might mean exactly what it says.

See you at the "fireworks" tonight. We're gonna have a "blast." Muahahahaha.

Indeed. The probability of government agencies not at least seriously considering a “Manhattan project” for quantum is zero.

But it’s a different situation from the 40s in many ways, consider this: quantum machines could potentially revolutionise several fields, including medicine. So by keeping an advanced machine secret (whether it has arrived or in the future) could be passing up the opportunity to save millions of lives. It’s a hell of a moral judgement call to make. I’d go so far as to say that any intelligence advantage is just not worth the trade off. You’d have to find some way to share that technology. If your hypothetical book emerged, it’d be fascinating to see how it is justified.

I think it's entirely plausible (and likely) that the US intelligence agencies would keep life-saving technologies secret if other uses of that tech would give them an edge in intelligence-gathering.

If they do have that box, they'll still be using it in 15-20 years. If nothing else, information from it will still be of some use and they won't want to give up the game.

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