Here’s my problem with the meme that NSA cannot get into an iPhone or similar because the encryption is so strong that even “acres of supercomputers running for years at best, age of the universe at worst.” If that were really the case as many claim, than why doesn’t the military use something similar? And if the military of this country and others use such a system why is NSA still around?
The answer is likely that the meme is not actually unbreakable, and there is some other way (secret/classified) way of breaking into these systems. No backdoor. Something else. Have no idea personally, but seems the only explanation why NSA and others like it are still in business. And no it isn’t there just to listen to your phone calls -
“The answer is likely that the meme is not actually unbreakable, and there is some other way (secret/classified) way of breaking into these systems.”
No, the answer is that not every company, device, and network is currently set up to be as secure as iPhone data is. There is nothing stopping them, the technology is freely available to all, but not all have adopted it yet. So the NSA is still able to collect and monitor plenty of data that is decryptable, for now. However, the writing is on the wall and they know that won’t be the case ten years from now, so they absolutely must get this legislation passed or they will be screwed until they get their hands on a working quantum computer.
“why doesn’t the military use something similar?”
Who says they fundamentally don’t? or use something better on general principle, which in doing so in no way detracts at the difficulty of breaking commercial strong encryption?
AFAIK, there is nothing compromising the security of RSA or better when using sufficient sized keys in normal usage.