Very interesting. I knew that state actors syphon everything, but I assumed it was since they can afford and it's a Hail Mary if they stumble on a breakthrough or a side channel. Some further Qs:
- What's near term? - What's in the far term? - I thought that encryption could be made arbitrarily more difficult to crack at little cost. Is this not the case? - Does this future assume quantum computing is feasible?
Finally, if encryption is no longer believed to be safe in the long term, shouldn't we be moving towards making one-time pads practical? Given modern data storage densities, it's not that unpractical for many use cases (say embassy communication, etc)
If Chinese intelligence services want information on a certain politician or business leader they're more likely to skip the decryption nonsense and just recruit one of the target's associates as a spy.