You'd be right except that anything encrypted now can be stored and cracked later. I remember as part of the snowden leaks there was documentation about this k

You'd be right except that anything encrypted now can be stored and cracked later. I remember as part of the snowden leaks there was documentation about this kind of delayed phase collection. Basically store as much signals data as you can and try to crack it later if there's a weakness discovered with the protocol or computing power starts being capable of wholesale attack. You might remember that hashes are significantly easier to crack with "rainbow tables", and so we added cryptographic "salts" to online password storage. We discovered that about 15 years ago and started salting all our passwords, but for a large window of time all of those old leaked databases were suddenly extremely easy to crack. Now, Imagine the NSA is 10 years ahead of us (and you might be close with that estimation), so even if they can't crack RSA right now they're much closer than we are, and even we get there we will likely have a large window of time before we fix it properly. (not that we're talking RSA here, but you get my point). https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/06/20/leaked-nsa-doc-says-it-can-collect-and-keep-your-encrypted-data-as-long-as-it-takes-to-crack-it/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/06/20/leaked...