Power Corrupts. Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely.

“Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.” John Steinbeck

12 May 1998

Last night the Discovery Channel (of all places) had a special on the National Security Agency (NSA). In it, they make a phenomenal claim: that the NSA has a computer called the “Thinking Machine” which can process in a few seconds that which would require a personal computer 22,000 YEARS. This claim sounds extraordinary, and it raises several issues, especially with regard to the RC5 distributed.net effort, which might pale in comparison to the government's computers.

So, I did some research. The results brings the whole battle over cryptography into perspective. A single Cray T3E-1200, for example, costs $64 per MFLOP (millions of floating-point operations per second) according to their press release, making the top-of-the-line model cost about $160 million. It scores 2.5 TFLOP per second (trillions of floating-point operations). By comparison, the distributed.net statistics page figures that a single 200MHz PPC 604e scores 70.2 MFLOPS, or more than 35,000 times slower than the Cray. They also figure that their aggregate MFLOPS number for just the PPC, Sparc, and x86 members to be 3.0 TFLOPs although that's broken up over 94,000+ participants’ CPUs. That number is also admitted to be inaccurate, but it certainly paints a picture: a dozen of these Crays could readily crack export-level encryption, and put a damper on distributed.net's claim that, “distributed.net will tackle large problems in encryption... that no individual, corporation, or government could tackle alone...” It makes you realize that computing power is all relative.

If the fears surrounding project Echelon have any merit at all, then those who value their privacy should begin using the strongest encryption available, as soon as possible, and use it routinely.

References:
http://www.aphorismsgalore.com
http://www.cray.com/products/systems/crayt3e/
http://rc5stats.distributed.net/


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PGP Encryption Available for secured messages. Not that it would do much good against a room of Crays (grin). Public key is available at MIT's site or here.