Can the government crack encryption like PGP?

[Vinnie From Indy]

It will be interesting to observe how society and the human imagination react and attempt to counter the total information awareness society being foisted upon us.

[jbond56]

1. encryption is only time shifting

bigger the key longer it takes to crack

[formercia]

2. The best thing is to assume that any encryption is vulnerable

The best thing to do is go quiet with personal information and ratchet up the fluff. Encrypt the fluff and make them waste their time on it.

[Egalitarian Thug]

3. Easily. Pretty Good Privacy was an early tool, but the good stuff was immediately outlawed

here in the land of the free. Merely possessing an effective encryption program is a crime.

[mathematic]

4. Encryption is not illegal. Possession of encryption algorithms is not a crime.

Also, PGP is still effective.

[Egalitarian Thug]

6. Oops you're right. It is the export, not import that is unlawful. Must be the senility setting in.

OTOH the issue is still far from clear and the Patriot Act muddied the waters even more. Here is an interesting analysis of two federal cases done by the EFF.

PGP is somewhat effective, but if you have anything that is actually worth encrypting, I'd go with something stronger.

[Recursion]

5. PGP is cryptographically effective

Which means, it will be cheaper for the government to kidnap you, drug you, and hit you with a wrench until you tell them the passphrase then it would be for them to fire up the supercomputer and break 4096-bit RSA.

[Savannahmann]

7. Yes.

Allow me to quote from this article.

But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”