You Will Be Assimilated by David P. Goldman

Author:David P. Goldman [Goldman, David P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781642935417
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Published: 2020-07-08T11:42:33+00:00

Chapter Five

The Twilight of the Spooks:

Quantum Cryptography and the End of American SIGINT Hegemony

America’s Intelligence Community spends nearly $80 billion a year, including $57 billion for the National Intelligence Program128 and $20 billion for the Military Intelligence Program. Some 70 percent of this is paid to private contractors, according to investigative journalist Tim Shorrock.129 Signals intelligence (SIGINT), mainly electronic eavesdropping, takes up the lion’s share of the budget; one-fifth of the Intelligence budget is devoted to codebreaking alone.130

Among other things, the National Security Agency recorded more than half a billion calls and text messages of Americans in 2017. In response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Security Agency admitted—for the second time—that it improperly eavesdropped on Americans. The spooks’ ability to tap the conversations of prospective terrorists, foreign leaders like Germany’s Angela Merkel, and pretty well anyone it wants is a source of enormous power as well as justification for continued funding.

All of that is about to come to an end. That has a great deal to do with the tech war between China and the United States.

The US intelligence services argue that if China’s national champion, Huawei, dominates the installation of 5G mobile broadband, it can build “backdoors” into its hardware to steal information, and perhaps even sabotage communication and industrial control networks in case of conflict. The US has threatened its allies with a cutback on intelligence sharing if they use Huawei equipment. So far, no country but Japan has acceded to American demands. Huawei denies that it has the capacity or intention to steal data, but charges of this sort are hard to disprove.

“The issue comes down to whether we get everyone’s data or China gets everyone’s data,” a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency told me, recently. That isn’t quite accurate. Technology now exists that will make large-scale data theft from broadband networks impossible—not just difficult or expensive, but outside the realm of physical possibility. That does not mitigate the risk that foreign components might contain malicious backdoors that enable a foreign power to tap certain information, or—more ominously—sabotage the system via remote instructions. As noted, all three major telecommunications equipment manufacturers—Huawei, Ericsson, and Nokia—manufacture key hardware in China. Theoretically, virtually all the broadband hardware sold over the world is vulnerable to Chinese hardware hacks. But the vast surveillance capability of the US National Security Agency and its partners in the Five Eyes group will come to an end in the age of quantum cryptography.

China Gets to the Holy Grail of Cryptography First

The Holy Grail of data security is quantum communications, an application of physics that China has pioneered. In June 2017, China created the first quantum communications link between a satellite and a ground station twelve hundred kilometers away. This got the scientific world’s undivided attention. Gabriel Popkin reported, in Science Magazine:

Quantum entanglement—physics at its strangest—has moved out of this world and into space. In a study that shows China’s growing mastery of both the

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