Tag: ek Politics

Oh, yes.  This works

TSA Granting Expedited Security Checks To Entire Lines Of Travelers Undercuts Everything About Its Security Theater

by Tim Cushing, Tech Dirt

Wed, Jan 15th 2014 7:46am

The TSA finally appears to be doing something to trim down the runtime of security theater performances. The PreCheck program, which sold travelers’ rights back to them for a smallish fee is now being applied randomly to people waiting in line. And not just certain somebodies as the TSA did randomly over the holiday season in an effort to appear slightly less annoying. A whole lot of somebodies, according to this report from The Consumerist.

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While the TSA would probably prefer this random largesse to be greeted with relief and gratitude, its normal day-to-day enforcement of petty, illogical policies ensures that this sort of thing is only greeted with suspicion.

Chris Morran was naturally perplexed by the TSA’s implicit admission that its security theater was, in fact, security theater. After all, if whole lines can be declared “not terrorists,” then why all the shoeless jumping through hoops the other 99.99% of the time?

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Morran has a good reason to be suspicious of this move. Not only does it undercut the TSA’s arguments for pretty much everything else that it does, it also contorts itself to give itself a pat on the back for being so damn good at detecting terrorists. This allows the TSA to give its Threat Assessment Program a veneer of legitimacy it hasn’t earned. Morran points out that he didn’t see a single “screening dog” anywhere and nothing indicating the decision was being made with any sort of “assessment” being involved. It was just business as usual and then, suddenly, everyone swept through the security process with shoes and laptops intact.

While I’m sure the travelers appreciated the expedited process, the real danger here is that the TSA — which is supposed to be ensuring our airplanes are terrorist-free — is now arbitrarily deciding to drop 90% of the process on a whim. Even if the infamous BDOs (and their pet friends) are performing some sort of en masse “assessment,” that process has been deemed no more likely to net a terrorist than the randomly dragging every other person off for extra screening. Either the TSA needs to drop the many pretenses that “support” its procedures or it needs to stand by the very things it has claimed for years are essential to preventing terrorist activity. What if this had nothing to do with assessment and had everything to do with agents feeling less than motivated? It would look exactly the same and would have the same amount of “threat detection” behind it.

Study: Analysis of 225 Terrorism Cases Finds NSA Phone Record Collection Didn’t Prevent Attacks

By: Kevin Gosztola, Firedog Lake

Monday January 13, 2014 10:28 am

According to the analysis by the New America Foundation, “An in-depth analysis of 225 individuals recruited by al-Qaeda or a like-minded group or inspired by al-Qaeda’s ideology, and charged in the United States with an act of terrorism since 9/11, demonstrates that traditional investigative methods, such as the use of informants, tips from local communities, and targeted intelligence operations, provided the initial impetus for investigations in the majority of cases, while the contribution of NSA’s bulk surveillance programs to these cases was minimal.”

Telephone metadata collection “played an identifiable role in initiating, at most, 1.8 percent of these cases.”

Initially, when revelations from disclosures from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden began to be published, US intelligence agency officials responded by claiming the program collecting the phone records of hundreds of millions of Americans had helped thwart 54 terrorist plots. That fabricated statistic gradually unraveled, especially after Senator Patrick Leahy confronted NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.

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Gen. Alexander has claimed, prior to 9/11, the NSA could not connect the dots because it did not have the dots. This is why it needs the bulk metadata program. But the government did not fail to stop hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar because it did not have this program. “The government missed multiple opportunities to catch Mihdhar.”

In effect, the NSA is exploiting a major policy failure that led to a terrorist attack in order to justify mass surveillance. Had information been shared and had agencies responded to warnings of impending attacks, it is possible Mihdhar could have been stopped.

“The overall problem for US counterterrorism officials is not that they need the information from the bulk collection of phone data, but that they don’t sufficiently understand or widely share the information they already possess that is derived from conventional law enforcement and intelligence techniques, the study concludes. It cites a number of recent terrorism attacks where this has been the case: Headley, Maj. Nidal Hasan, Umar Farouq Abdulmutallab, Carlos Bledsoe.

This deconstruction of false statements has had an impact. Now, intelligence officials, like former NSA deputy director John Inglis (who retired on Friday), fall back on the argument that the program is an “insurance policy.”

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More than six months later, officials have retreated to we must have the phone records of all Americans in a database because it helps us sleep at night. Which proves there is no actual legitimate security justification for collecting and storing the phone records of all Americans.

The only argument for continuing this program is built on an unflinching belief in subjecting a population to mass surveillance. And, when Obama says he will continue it in some form on Friday, he will be arguing for the preservation of a clearly authoritarian program.

Citizens of the USA are the most craven, cowardly people I’ve ever met.

I frequently read (and hear) a question that goes something like this-

ek, it’s all very well that you are here documenting the atrocities and I understand the goals of your sites and writing are modest indeed, simply to provide a platform for others and encourage revolution in the small things, but I’m at my wits end!  What do I do?

To which my answer is invariably- stop rewarding bad behavior.

As your Mother said, this hurts me more than it does you.  The path of least resistance is appeasement and compliance, but spoiling pets, children, and politicians is the coward’s course.

The problem of resistance to the oligarchy

Ian Welsh

2014 January 12

You can also get change through making the lives of the rich unpleasant, or making them fear for their very lives.  Social peace has often been bought by treating ordinary people better, when the rich genuinely feared the army and police couldn’t protect them.

But if the elites think that their security forces can protect them, and especially if they live in a bubble where they never have to face people whose lives they have made miserable, as is the case for most of our rich, who fly by private jet, travel about the city in helicopters or chauffered limos and live in gated enclaves; and if you can’t cost them any real money, why should they let you have any of the surplus of society beyond the bare minimum you need to remain useful to them? (Not to survive: as the cutting of food stamps in the US indicates, that’s not a priority for the oligarchy.)

Be clear that distribution of goods and money in an economy is almost entirely unrelated to any ethical idea of merit or deservedness.  The bankers, amongst the best paid people in the world economy, destroyed far more money than they earned in the 00s, and yet are still paid billions of dollars in bonuses every year.  They receive the money they do because they had the power to make the government make them whole after they lost everything, then the power to make the government make them even richer than before.  They control a bundle of valuable rights from the state: the right to borrow at prime, the right to value assets to model (fantasy); the right to huge leverage; and the right lend, which is how money is actually created in our economy (aka. they can print money.)

This is why they’re rich: not because they produce net value: they destroy value; but because they have the power to make the government do what they want it to do and to make it not prosecute them when they break the laws, and even to change the laws so they can take even more money.

Distribution in an economy is based, virtually entirely, on power. A group receives goods and money because it can force others to give it to them.  The libertarian fantasy of free markets and free choice is exactly that. They don’t exist today, they have rarely existed in the past, and to the extent they have existed they owe their existence entirely to government making sure they exist.  As soon as any group gains enough power to take over government, they do, and free markets cease to exist because they make the government give them special rights,whether those are rights to print money, borrow low and lend high, or so-called intellectual property rights that let them continue to profit from ideas created 80 years ago.

Power, power is all that matters.  Even distribution, or something close to it, happens only when there is relatively equality between groups in society or there is an existential threat to society which requires the willing participation of all parts of society.

If you ever want to see raises for ordinary people again, you must figure out how they will become powerful: and power means “what can they do to hurt people who cross them, hurt them really, really badly.”

The Power Parable

Ian Welsh

January 9, 2014

Imagine that you have crawled out of the desert. You have not drunk in days, and if you do not have water soon you will die. Only one man has water, but he will not give it to you for free, he wants to be paid.

What is that water worth? To put it another way, what is your life worth?

One answer is that your life is worth everything you will ever earn, minus the cost of subsistence. The water-seller might say “if you die, you will never earn anything again. Therefore everything you earn is because I gave you water. So this water is worth your life’s income.”

Now you might not find life worth living under these circumstances, which amount to slavery. If the water-seller had many possible customers crawling out of the desert, he might find that too many people would rather die than pay, and might reduce his price somewhat to maximize his profit. If one quarter of people would rather die than pay, he might reduce the price to two-thirds of his customers life earnings, and see if most of them were willing to pay that.

Over time he might find that, knowing he’d take two-thirds, once saved his customers wouldn’t work very hard: just enough for subsistence and some alcohol, perhaps. So he might continue to experiment-how much could he take to maximize his profits?

But there is another possibility, back at the original bargain “your earnings, or your life?” What if you decide to take the water whether the water-seller wants you to have it or not? What if you’re willing to use violence? You’re weak, you might not win and if you lose you’re dead, but you might win and if you do you don’t have to pay anything. And if you win, you could start selling water yourself.

The water-seller has to take this into account. Which means he either has to reduce the price he charges so it’s not worth people trying to kill him, or he has to spend some of his profits on security. Thugs, pretty much.

But why pay for his own thugs? Why not pay government, and use its thugs? Everybody chips in some money, the government creates police and an army, and they make sure that customers don’t just take the water. They also solve another problem we hadn’t mentioned, making sure that people keep paying up later once they are no longer dying for thirst. The government enforces the water-seller’s contracts.

It should be pointed out that the water-payer is getting a lot more out of the governments thugs than most ordinary people are. Even if we assume the new police enforce all contracts and stop violence against everyone (as best they can), this guy has a lot more enforcement needs and a lot more people who want to kill him than an ordinary person. So even if everyone pays, say, 10% of income for the police, our water-seller is doing well out of this.

But why should the water-seller pay 10%? If the government has politicians whose money is separate from the government’s money, who can’t just use it as their purse, why not give them personally, say, 2% in gifts. That’s enough money to make them, personally, filthy rich. And they can lower water-seller taxes (after all, he saves lives and is a lynchpin of the economy) and raise them on other people. With a bit of work he might not pay any direct taxes, only gifts, and the rest of the population will pay for the enforcement of his contract rights. Yes, that reduces the post-subsistence money he gets from the people whose lives he saved, but for every dollar spent on enforcement he would have only gotten two-thirds anyway.

Over at Naked Capitalism our old pal dday has a couple of thought provoking pieces I’d like to draw your attention to.

The second is a reprint of an article by Chris Mayer that has also appeared at New Economic Perspectives.  Chris is no deficit dove, in fact he used to be an Austrian which is the school of Weber, Mises, and Hayek and heavily influenced the thinking of the ‘Freshwater’ University of Chicago style of economics with its theories of perfect markets and concerns about inflation.

In it he describes a simple thought experiment proposed by Warren Mosler (considered the father of neo-Chartalism or as we know it more familiarly now- Modern Monetary Theory) to describe how fiat currency, which is to say sovereign currency unbacked by any fixed convertibility into commodities or currency other than that of the state that issues it, works.

Chris Mayer: How Fiat Money Works

by David Dayen, Naked Capitalism

Posted on January 9, 2014

Imagine parents create coupons they use to pay their kids for doing chores around the house. They “tax” the kids 10 coupons per week. If the kids don’t have 10 coupons, the parents punish them. “This closely replicates taxation in the real economy, where we have to pay our taxes or face penalties,” Mosler writes.

So now our household has its own currency. This is much like the U.S. government, which issues dollars, a fiat currency. (Meaning Uncle Sam doesn’t have to give you something else for it. Say, like a certain weight in gold.) If you think through this simple analogy, all kinds of interesting insights emerge.

For example, do the parents have to get coupons from their kids before they can pay them to do any chores? Obviously not. In fact, the parents have to spend their coupons first by paying their children to do chores before they can collect the tax. “How else can the children get the coupons they owe to the parents?” Mosler writes.

“Likewise,” he continues, “in the real economy, the federal government, just like this household with its own coupons, doesn’t have to get the dollars it spends from taxing or borrowing or anywhere else to be able to spend them.”

The government creates dollars. It doesn’t even have to print them. The vast majority of spending is simply done by adding electronic dollars to bank accounts. Therefore, the U.S. government can’t go bankrupt. It pays all its bills in U.S. dollars, of which it is the sole issuer.

This sounds really obvious, but it is amazing how many people – even very smart people – forget this simple fact. They get hysterical about the fiscal deficit or the national debt. (This is not to say there aren’t bad consequences from issuing too many coupons, or from government spending in general.) The only way the U.S. government can default is if it chooses to do so.

Going back to Mosler’s example, let’s ask another question: How can the kids “save” coupons in excess of the weekly tax? Well, they can only do that if the parents spend more than they tax. There is no other way to hoard coupons. In the real economy, the same is true. The private sector can save dollars only if the government spends more than it taxes. Spending pours fiat money into an economy; tax payments drain it away.

Another question: Do the parents have fewer coupons if they spend more than they tax? No. The parents make the coupons. They don’t even need physical coupons. They can simply track them on a piece of paper or in a spreadsheet. Likewise, the U.S. government doesn’t have any fewer dollars after running deficits. It can’t run out. (There are real-world restraints on how much government spends.) To borrow from another Mosler analogy, the U.S. government can no more run out of dollars than a scorekeeper can run out of points.

You don’t have to like this. (I don’t.) It’s merely a description of how a fiat currency system works. That’s the world we live in.

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One great story Mosler tells in both books is how he cleaned up on another free lunch in lira-denominated bonds in the early ’90s. This was before the euro and back when there was worry over a default by Italy’s government. Italy’s national debt was 110% of GDP and interest rates were high on its bonds.

But Mosler knew that it was the sole issuer of lira. Italy could not default unless it wanted to. Mosler actually met with senior officials in Rome to let them in on the “secret.” Long story short, Italy didn’t default. Mosler’s fund made over $100 million.

For an investor, macroeconomics has limited uses most of the time. Mosler’s career shows this can be otherwise. But then again, you have to study economics that actually describe the real world. And Mosler’s economics, or MMT, does that rather well.

JP Morgan Will Not Be Criminally Prosecuted for Its Role in Madoff’s Ponzi Scheme

Transcript

Elizabeth Warren, Tom Coburn Introduce “Naked Capitalism Was Right About the Corruption of Financial Regulators Act” (Not Actually Called That)

by David Dayen, Naked Capitalism

Posted on January 9, 2014

I’ve been going out of my mind the past few days seeing the easily duped traditional media uncritically printing statistical analysis from JPMorgan Chase’s roundelay of get-out-of-jail-almost-free settlements. The gist of it, and this must have been in a Department of Justice release somewhere, is that JPM has “paid” $20 billion over the last calendar year to resolve a variety of disputes, the most recent being their admission that they knew the bogus nature of Bernie Madoff’s business and never generated any suspicious activity reports or raised red flags for regulators (the fact that they took their money out of Madoff feeder funds right before he was arrested being a smoking gun).

Peter Eavis at the New York Times scratches his head and wonders how the bank has “taken in stride” all this hemorrhaging of cash in fraud settlements. Well first of all, considering that shareholders effectively pay the fines and nobody in the executive suites has to go to jail, I’d say taking it in stride is a pretty proper reaction. But just as important is that $20 billion is a FAKE NUMBER.

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That’s just one piece of the puzzle. Most of the aforementioned MBS settlement was tax-deductible. The big National Mortgage Settlement and others allowed JPM to write off their penalty with investors’ money. They’re suing the FDIC to stick them with the bill for WaMu losses even though they assumed them in the acquisition. The games are notable and legendary. JPMorgan Chase isn’t worried about paying $20 billion because there is no such number. That the media reports this speaks to their incurious nature, and allows the Justice Department and people like Eric Schneiderman to get away with claiming a “get tough” approach when the settlements look more like back-door bailouts.

Along comes Elizabeth Warren with a bill to attack this corruption directly. Warren and Tom Coburn introduced the Truth in Settlements Act, which uses disclosure to force these little games into the open.

Under the law, any settlement with federal agencies over $1 million would have to be completely disclosed to the public, with all relevant details out there, including how the topline number gets applied in reality.

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Regulators are basically getting a free ride from the press for their inadequacy in enforcing the law, and this bipartisan bill puts a big red target on their back. Maybe they’ll think twice about the largesse given to banks in the form of a fake penalty; I’m skeptical, but at least they’ll feel the eyes on them. I am happy to see a Senator basically calling the regulatory agencies liars (on the call, she said “They shouldn’t be able to advertise a high sticker price that they know is untrue”), and moving to produce legislation to stop them from lying. Who knows where it will go – Congress doesn’t pass many laws anymore – but this is a case where the mere potential for embarrassment could spur better behavior.

There is an apocryphal story about a trial where the defendant is accused of gambling and his defense was that he was playing Poker, which is not gambling at all.

In Poker one of your strongest tools is the Bluff, where you make a strong hand appear weak and a weak hand appear strong (through we generally only think of the latter).  As Joanne Woodward says in Big Hand for a Little Lady– “It’s not cheating, it’s entirely in the spirit of the game.”

Administration Peddling Increasing Blatant Canards on Proposed “Trade” Deals

by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism

Posted on January 6, 2014

One of the tricks of dealmaking and legislating is to try to create the impression that the negotiations/vote herding are going well, even when they aren’t. That tactic was fully on display with the Administration’s failed effort to get Congressional approval for intervention in Syria. The White House kept messaging that it was getting support lined up even when whip counts showed that putting the measure to a vote would result in an overwhelming rejection.

Now while things are not as clear cut on the trade deals, they were already in trouble last year. Foreign news reports indicated that various proposed signatories to the TransPacific Partnership simply weren’t on board with provisions that the Americans regarded as critical. A State Department press conference after talks in Bali was so out of tune and arrogant that the press representatives there were openly skeptical. And that was before the Wikileaks disclosure of the text of one of the draft chapters, on intellectual property. It both showed how extreme the American position is and how much opposition it was getting from the other supposed “partners”. We don’t know as much about where the European deal stands, but there’s reason to believe that those potential signatories have much less reason to make the world safer for US IT companies in the wake of ongoing revelations about NSA snooping.

So what line is the Administration, via the Financial Times, pushing? (Note my surmise is this article comes directly or from sources close to the US Trade Representative’s office; it very mildly complains that Obama hasn’t spoken forcefully enough about trade, as if that’s going to make any difference).

In the article, Obama challenge on selling trade deals to resurgent left, there is astonishingly no mention of the issues the prospective partners have with the deal or how the Wikileaks publication showed that the critics if anything had understated how bad the deal is. And the headline pretty accurately reflects the spin of the article: Obama’s is supposedly those damned pinkos, as opposed to his lame duck status and the increasingly obvious outrageousness of the deal. But to an uninformed reader, it’s easy to sell the prejudice that only Luddite lefties are against the motherhood and apple pie of economists and the business community, “free trade”.

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Puhleeze. First, these “allies” that the Administration must manfully contend with are wusses. They make a show of opposition and let Team Dem carry on catering to powerful monied interests as usual.

Second, the notice how opposition to the deals are subtly presented as uninformed, as mere prejudice? The resistance is based on mere “belief”. In fact, NAFTA led to nearly a million lost jobs, and as we recounted in a weekend post, also wrecked much of the agricultural sector in Mexico. Tell me exactly how that helped regular people? And further notice the subtle bias in “ordinary workers”. To an FT reader, those are not part of their cohort, which are those directly connected to capital and the technocratic elite (executives, senior managers, policy wonks).

Third, the resistance extends well beyond the usual toothless leftie suspects. Over 200 Representatives, including some Republicans, have signed letters or otherwise voiced reservations about the trade deals. and another 30 to 40 are believed to be concerned. The opposition goes well beyond the small cohort of “progressives”.

Fourth, the Financial Times, rather than doing actual journalism (as in investigating) runs the blatant lie that the Administration is working to get tougher regulations via these deals. The most fundamental provisions of both pacts involve gutting regulations via strengthening the rights of foreign investors to sue governments at all level for anticipated losses (mind you, they don’t even have to prove they’d occurred) before secret international tribunals. As the group Public Citizen has documented in considerable detail, these panels are corrupt and bend over backwards to issue pro-investor rulings.

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The Senate Finance Committee is gearing up to move a Trade Promotion Authority, which is just another term of art for what is also called “fast track”. Fast track give Congress a limited amount of time to respond to a tabled trade deal with a simple up or down vote. This is just the old effort to move the pacts forward.

But this messaging means the Administration is still keen to get these deals done, which means it is also incumbent to keep the pushback going. Please call or e-mail your representative and tell them “Hell no!”

I think I might tell you some more about this research company that I have in the past and my brother currently works for, but what’s relevant today is that one of his most frequent pieces of field work is observing cars to collect statistics on how many people are texting while driving.

Yup.  I expect they’ll turn themselves in now and serve their time.

Just like Ed Snowden.

(note: This is Timothy A. Wise, Director of the Research and Policy Program at the Global Development and Environment Institute, Tufts University not Timothy J. Wise, anti-racism activist and writer)

How beer explains 20 years of NAFTA’s devastating effects on Mexico

Timothy A. Wise, Global Post

January 2, 2014 07:00

NAFTA produced a devastating one-two punch. For the first 10 years, the flood of US exports of corn, wheat, meat and other staples drove Mexican producer prices well below the costs of production.

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By the mid-2000s, Mexico was importing 42 percent of its food, mostly from the United States. Corn import dependence had grown from 8 percent before NAFTA to 32 percent. Mexico was importing nearly 60 percent of its wheat where before it had imported less than 20 percent.

Import dependence was more than 70 percent for soybeans, rice and cotton.

Then came the sucker punch. In 2007, international prices for many staple crops doubled or tripled, and so did the cost of importing them. Countries like Mexico that had gotten hooked on cheap imports paid a heavy price. Call it the Age of Dependency.

US policies had as much to do with these high and volatile prices as they had with the Age of Dumping. Now, instead of price-depressing surpluses caused by US agricultural policies, US subsidies and incentives were diverting 40 percent of US corn – 15 percent of the global supply – into ethanol production.

This drove up the price of corn, but also prices for related crops, like soybeans and wheat, and the livestock products that had relied for so long on cheap feed.

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(T)he beer sector is a perfect example of the kind of integration NAFTA can achieve.

“Look, Mexico’s even importing the barley malt from us to make its beer!” I said.

I took another sip.

“So Mexico’s agricultural contribution to its beer exports is … what?” I asked.

Nervous laughter.

Here is a case where NAFTA has gotten the United States to open its market to something of value that Mexico can export, and Mexico can’t even capture the value from it. The industry’s growth benefits US barley growers and US malt makers. Mexico can’t even import the barley and make the malt themselves.

So the country is basically a maquiladora for beer bottling. I guess Mexico contributes the water. Which it doesn’t have enough of.

20 Years on, Mexico is NAFTA’s Biggest Lie

Transcript

(note: David Bacon is an award-winning photojournalist, author, and immigrant rights activist who has spent over twenty years as a labor organizer.)

NAFTA Hurt Workers on Both Sides of the Border

Transcript

By Pushing the TPP, Obama is Repeating the Mistakes of NAFTA

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Zapatista Uprising 20 Years Later: How Indigenous Mexicans Stood Up Against NAFTA “Death Sentence”

Democracy Now

On the same day the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect on Jan. 1, 1994, the Zapatista National Liberation Army and people of Chiapas declared war on the Mexican government, saying that NAFTA meant death to indigenous peoples. They took over five major towns in Chiapas with fully armed women and men.

Zapatista’s Warning Over NAFTA Rings True 2 Decades Later

Transcript

Though the math is hard the concept of Quantum Mechanics is easily graspable by most intelligent individuals.  The key is realizing that what you think of as reality isn’t really very real at all, and is instead the product of your observation.

The classic case is of course Schrödinger’s cat where the cat is either alive or dead based on a quantum state that theoretically can not be known until you measure it at which time it’s resolved in a binary fashion.  The cat is either alive OR dead.

Of course common sense tells you that any cat you keep locked up in a box since 1935 is pretty surely dead, but quantum mechanics is designed for the study of very small and ephemeral items like photons at which it has amazingly useful predictive value.

Now that’s all very well and good, but what has physicists scratching their heads is the asymmetry of the forces we see working on a large scale, like cats for instance, and the distinct lack of anti-cats (cats made of anti-matter) when at a quantum level there is no reason to favor one over the other.

Another puzzler is that in the Standard Model (that’s why the Higg’s Boson is such a big deal is that it confirms the Standard Model) Quantum Entities are most often created in pairs and it is possible to infer the value of one member of such a pair by examining the other regardless of the distance between them.

Yup, faster than the speed of light.

Now one of the interesting limitations of modern computers is that they use electrons to store and process information and electrons, while fast, are no faster than light speed.  The late great Grace Hooper used to carry around 11.8 in lengths of copper wire to illustrate how far a nanosecond was.  If you read the specifications of RAM a speed of 8 or 9 nanoseconds (which is pretty gosh darn fast actually) means an electron can travel no more than about 8 feet.

Quantum computing erases that speed limit (in addition to some other wackier things like storing information in several dimensional states instead of a simple binary on/off condition).

In any event the NSA has been experimenting with quantum computing in the hopes of solving the most difficult encryption available in reasonable amounts of time instead of some point after the heat death of the Universe.

Despite the scary title the good news from this report is that they haven’t gotten much farther along than anyone else.

NSA seeks to build quantum computer that could crack most types of encryption

By Steven Rich and Barton Gellman, Washinton Post

Thursday, January 2, 4:24 PM

The development of a quantum computer has long been a goal of many in the scientific community, with revolutionary implications for fields like medicine as well as for the NSA’s code-breaking mission. With such technology, all forms of public key encryption would be broken, including those used on many secure Web sites as well as the type used to protect state secrets.

Physicists and computer scientists have long speculated whether the NSA’s efforts are more advanced than those of the best civilian labs. Although the full extent of the agency’s research remains unknown, the documents provided by Snowden suggest that the NSA is no closer to success than others in the scientific community.

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Quantum computing is so difficult to attain because of the fragile nature of such computers. In theory, the building blocks of such a computer might include individual atoms, photons or electrons. To maintain the quantum nature of the computer, these particles would need to be carefully isolated from their external environments.

“Quantum computers are extremely delicate, so if you don’t protect them from their environment, then the computation will be useless,” said Daniel Lidar, a professor of electrical engineering and the director of the Center for Quantum Information Science and Technology at the University of Southern California.

This is of course due to their quantum nature.  Once someone, anyone, looks at the cat they’re either alive or dead.

By Democracy Now featuring Julian Assange, Sarah Harrison, and Jacob Appelbaum.