In 2010, a 768-bit RSA key was broken. I'm not saying that they're not for the most part secure. In fact, I never said that. What I said was that nothing you do is secure to a sufficiently-dedicated cracker, which is completely accurate. If the NSA really wanted to, yes, they could break even a 768-bit cipher, and we're only getting better at it.

Saying something is 'for the most part secure' is completely compatible with my claim that we use encryption to keep lay people out, which it is extremely effective at doing. That one 768 bit key took a team of dedicated supercomputers a year and a half to break, which I feel falls within my definition of sufficiently determined.

EDIT: I'm sorry, I need to amend this post. I forgot about one-time-padding and quantum cryptography, which none of the aforementioned services the NSA is monitoring use.

DOUBLE EDIT: Actually, it's occurred to me that I might not have been clear with this; you're right, the NSA is just asking Google for the transmitted data, which is easier than trying to break it. The beef of my post was to the latter of the article's claims, that social networking services have servers so insecure that they could be broken like this. My point was that if they *had to* do it, they most certainly *could*.

Oh god I'm glad that's not a real website (I didn't check)

Well, this isn't 100% right. There *are* ways to browse more or less anonymously. There are email services that are routed through layered networks that have too much complexity to solve. Tor, Hushmail, a lot of the undernet is out there and not able to be easily seen -- they can see that you're connecting to a layered routing network, but it's extremely difficult to trace what you're actually doing in there. This is how places like Silk Road are able to survive, it's just that hard to track them.

But upfist, because yeah, it's pretty unrealistic to think you can have privacy on an open internet.

Okay, no-snark-talk from a Programmer/Crypto guy time:

Nothing, nothing over any wireless or wired or donkey-carried communication is secure. This is not tin-foil-hattery or paranoia, it's the truth. Communications between individuals can be monitored at any time. They are encrypted not to keep out the people who actually know how to decipher them, but to keep out lay people who don't have the resources any major intelligence agency has.

It's not a matter of Google or Yahoo's servers being insecure; they may have some of the best private-level security in the world, but a sufficiently-dedicated codebreaker can, given enough time and resources, subvert that security. It's a fact of life -- our current style of cryptography isn't to make passwords magically secret, it's to make passwords that are so incredibly complex that they require refrigerator-sized supercomputers to figure out or extremely specialized hardware.

The shocking thing about this whole debacle is that so many people are regarding it as news: As has been explained, the NSA has been around and capable since 1952. Hell, it developed many of the security protocols we use today and adopted most of them as standards as time passed, until someone *in* the NSA found an effective way to break them.

I just wish the government would be honest about it -- none of this 'The innocent have nothing to hide' rhetoric, that's disingenuous. Go for something more realistic, like "Yeah, we know Dok Zoom is signed up on badponiesbigbronies.com, and we really don't give two bags of salted rat dicks."

I feel dirty saying it, but I actually liked those dog paintings.

*checks watch* Better go grab my whiskey and help my USMC Iraq/Afghan veteran friend work through his PTSD. :(

Maybe she's just trying to make up for how good of a writer her husband is.

I feel I should remind people that Weiner has already showed hundreds of thousands of people that he has the balls to run again.

Jaden, Aiden, Hayden, Bryden... Someday I'll hear about someone naming their kid Raiden.

And then I'll be happy.

I keep mashing the upfist button but it only goes up once! ;_;

That's odd, carpet-chewing never made me mad.