Under all that bleakness, though, there's a few things that are just true, insofar as we understand the math. One of those is that public key cryptography *works*, unless we are wrong about some pretty fundamental assumptions about what kinds of math are easy and hard.

Math has given us an incredible tool that we can use to keep ourselves safe from adversaries with much, much, much more computational power.

We shouldn't give up that tool lightly.

@xgranade
This is obvious disinfo, and IMO some of the most frustrating kind!
Setting aside the casual mixing of real threats and paranoid fantasy, the very structure of the argument is counter-productive garbage!
To throw away a tool because it might not work in the future, especially when there is no replacement, is a strict downgrade! It is worse than doing nothing. We need to keep fighting with the tools we have while we have them, not stop until some time in the future where doing nothing magically puts us in a better position with better tools that we will somehow get by not building them. This argument structure is just seeking comfort in giving up. If the NSA really does have some magic math that breaks all cryptography, make them actually use it!

Returning to the top layer of nonsense. Mixing true threats and harms with imagined exaggerations is the behavior I originally blocked this account for. It is pretty common on fedi though, Nina is by no means the only high profile account engaging this way. Half of the "journalists" here do it to get clicks. The whole point of this is to build a sense of authenticity and authority by claiming you are the only one who really knows how bad it is. This is extremely effective in left activist and similarly marginalized spaces because so many people are used to obvious harms being denied by corporate media and other liberal/fascist culture outlets. I think the people who exemplify it most clearly are the snake oil salesmen, see folks like Rob Braxman or Steve Gibson for some tech examples. Not everyone is doing it directly for financial gain though, plenty engage this way to farm engagement for their own credibility or to boost whatever real work they do, some even do it just for the ego.

I think a useful way to identify this kind of behavior is to watch how people pushing a narrative or "breaking a story" engage with technical or academic experts in whatever field. Look at Nina's replies and its clear she doesn't have a clue, even people exited to share the doomer perspective because they have expertise looking into the yawning void of computer security are correcting her on basic cryptography history.

@xgranade

there’s two “theys” relevant to encryption:

the government: the US government has fired all its scientists and defunded all its research. “they” are not about to crack all cryptography.

Silicon Valley: they’re all busy holding bacchanalias until the LLM money runs out, at which point half of them will have forgotten how to program. “they” are not about to crack all cryptography.

@xgranade the general threat model. Supported by a bunch of orgs that trade in security, is that there's cryptography that's secure from Quantum and cryptography that will be broken as soon as Quantum happens. This seems to be true and has been just about to happen for as long as I've been aware of cryptography.

The theory of people is that governments are storing vast troves of data which they will decrypt as soon as quantum computers become viable.

This is a reasonable threat model, ish, but I'm not aware of any security program that hasn't been using "post-quantum encryption" for as long as its been available, so it's a mostly misinformed and outdated one.