After seeing Quantum of Solace, I was reminded of a question I've wondered about for some time: How much more advanced are governments' technology (specifically the US) than tech that civilians have?<p>This comes up in a number of areas:<p>- Encryption / Ability to Decrypt stuff<p>- Computational Power (supercomputers)<p>- Satellite and GPS granularity<p>- Real-time surveillance and wiretapping<p>I've always found encryption and all that interesting, but there's always the question of whether or not the government can decrypt communications, etc. In my case, practicality has won out for the time being -- I don't worry about my generally-benign e-mails and other files stored in the cloud for instance, and the tedious nature of typing passwords each time I step to my PC, and to access my data, has yet to trump my perceived need for encryption and security.<p>I would think that if the government had some secret supercomputer capable of decrypting strongly-encrypted files, that technology would be publicly known. But with the stuff in movies about super-advanced tech, it's not an unreasonable thing to wonder about.<p>How much farther ahead is government tech than civilians? Are the dazzling displays of tech in spy movies purely fantasy, or is there some element of truth to the government's secret and/or superior technical knowledge or resource?
Pay attention when public researchers say "if I had enough money, I think I could...", and you'll probably get a good sense of what the more advanced government agencies have access to.<p>As far as encryption goes, I'd say that AES-128 is probably safe from offline decryption by the NSA right now, but I wouldn't trust it to be secure ten years from now, or to be secure against active attack right now. I doubt the NSA can find pre-images for SHA256, but I wouldn't be surprised if they had found collisions. I doubt the NSA can factor 2048-bit semiprimes, but I'd be shocked if they couldn't factor 1024-bit semiprimes.