a 1024-bit RSA factoring device can likely be built using only commercially available technology for a price range of several hundred million dollars to about 1 billion dollars. Costs may well drop lower if one has the use of a chip fab. It is a matter of public record that the NSA as well as the Chinese, Russian, French, and many other intelligence agencies alloperate their own fabs.
Some may consider a price tag potentially reaching $1B prohibitive. One should keep in mind that the NRO regularly launches SIGINT satellites costing close to $2B each. Would the NSA have built a device at less than half the cost of one of their satellites to be able to decipher the interception data obtained via many such satellites? The NSA would have to be derelict of duty to not have done so.(...)
In light of the above, I reluctantly revoked all my personal 1024-bit PGP keys and the large web-of-trust that these keys have acquired over time.
"America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception.
"Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of great moral weight. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight."
--James Ellroy, American Tabloid
Ensure a Free and Fair Election (Ban Paperless Voting Machines
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."
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