Bernstein's Blog
Bernstein's Blog
Posted Dec 14, 2025 16:43 UTC (Sun) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)In reply to: Bernstein's Blog by marcH
Parent article: Disagreements over post-quantum encryption for TLS
No, I mean that even one person doing everything the NSA is tasked with would face trouble resolving the inherent contradiction in its tasks; it's not that different people in the organisation have different priorities and interests, but rather that the NSA is supposed to both ensure that American businesses and government agencies can use unbreakable encryption no matter who they're communicating with, while also ensuring that non-American entities have no access to encryption the NSA can't break no matter who they're communicating with.
Even if the NSA was a singular person, that would be an impossible pair of missions to deliver on - how do you deliver encryption that's both broken by the NSA and unbreakable by anyone simultaneously to a non-American entity communicating with an American business or government agency?
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