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Historically speaking, the US Government is pretty damn good at winning wars of attrition. Don't think you're going to find any amount of money that Congress wo

Historically speaking, the US Government is pretty damn good at winning wars of attrition. Don't think you're going to find any amount of money that Congress won't happily hand to the military-industrial complex. They'll spend whatever it takes.

Shivetya 13y ago
then the people need to keep voting new people into office until the politicians GET IT.
unoti 13y ago
Does this apply to Viet Nam, and Mission Accomplished?
- superuser2 13y ago
  Breaking cryptography doesn't require sending people's children to die, giving people PTSD, or otherwise angering a significant portion of the US population. If anything, it creates good middle-class jobs. Imagine how much computing power the US fighter jet program's budget could buy.
toyg 13y ago
Buying two to three years will be enough in the average case. Targeted individual surveillance will likely always be possible (not just because of encryption, but because of the 5$ wrench, trojans and so on). What we need is to make global, indiscriminate and realtime surveillance computationally unfeasible. Three years from now, most commercially-sensitive, politically-embarrassing, or otherwise-newsworthy material, will likely be obsolete.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- superuser2 13y ago
  I spoke imprecisely... I mean as far as spending. People had to die to continue fighting in Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, and Afghanistan; we determined that the death toll wasn't worth it. To break crypto, we have to fund STEM research, buy hardware, and create good middle-class jobs. Good luck creating a public outcry over that. We're not winning the war on drugs, but there is no indication of giving up on it at the federal level. Law enforcement spending is not slowing down. I was thinking more of the USSR. There didn't seem to be any amount of money we weren't willing to spend. Lives, yes, but not money.
saalweachter 13y ago
Honestly I'm not sure who would win. One estimate I found was that there 150 million iPhone 5's shipped in the first year, and each one was about 25 GFlops. If 1% of that CPU was spent encrypting & decrypting communications to and from the iPhones, that is about 37,500 TFlops, which is just over the Rmax listed for the top supercomputer, Tianhe-2. Some numbers for the cost of that supercomputer are around $100 million, but the estimated cost for the Xeon Phis alone could be as high as $250 million. Giving the defenders the advantage, let's round up to $1 billion. So the NSA needs to spend $1 billion per year to counteract the top smartphone in the world. Their budget is estimated to be as high as $10 billion / year, so they could do it. But how much of the total pie are iPhone 5's? I think to be competitive we need to push the cost to the NSA up towards $30 or $100 billion per year. $1 billion is trivial, $10 billion Congress will swallow and move on. They still fund NASA to the tune of $16 billion, and no one in Congress even cares about NASA anymore. But $100 billion per year, then you're talking real money. So what fraction of total personal computer sales are iPhone 5's? If they're 10%, we'll be hard-pressed to keep the NSA out of the game. If they're 1% of personal computer sales, I think we have a chance of keeping ahead of them.
- superuser2 13y ago
  Current estimated total cost for just one of many fighter jet programs (F-35 joint strike fighter): $397 billion. That's when we're barely making noise about something that unequivocally provides no national security benefit unless we're planning on aerial dogfighting like it's WWI. There are dozens of similarly useless or near-useless defense spending programs, like the tanks the Army keeps saying it doesn't want. Imagine what we could spend on an actual threat.
  - saalweachter 13y ago
    That's $397 billion over many years; I am suggesting a target of $100 billion per year. That's not to say we couldn't or wouldn't spend in excess of $100 billion per year on a boondoggle. We've done it before and we'll do it again. But I think $100 billion is the point at which money even becomes an issue. $1 or $10 billion and there's barely a point in trying.
dragonwriter 13y ago
> Historically speaking, the US Government is pretty damn good at winning wars of attrition. Unless you are speaking in some kind of figurative sense where I'm missing the metaphor, this isn't really true. The few real wars of attrition where the US has been on the winning side (WWI comes to mind) it "won" by joining late when the other side (as well as its allies) had already suffered considerable attrition. But even in those circumstances, its record in wars of attrition isn't that great (the US portion of the extended colonial conflict in Indochina comes to mind.)
- superuser2 13y ago
  Yeah it was an unfortunate phrasing. I meant as far as outspending an enemy (i.e. the USSR) to match/exceed technological capabilities.

Shivetya 13y ago

then the people need to keep voting new people into office until the politicians GET IT.

unoti 13y ago

Does this apply to Viet Nam, and Mission Accomplished?

superuser2 13y ago
Breaking cryptography doesn't require sending people's children to die, giving people PTSD, or otherwise angering a significant portion of the US population. If anything, it creates good middle-class jobs. Imagine how much computing power the US fighter jet program's budget could buy.

toyg 13y ago

Buying two to three years will be enough in the average case. Targeted individual surveillance will likely always be possible (not just because of encryption, but because of the 5$ wrench, trojans and so on). What we need is to make global, indiscriminate and realtime surveillance computationally unfeasible. Three years from now, most commercially-sensitive, politically-embarrassing, or otherwise-newsworthy material, will likely be obsolete.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

superuser2 13y ago
I spoke imprecisely... I mean as far as spending. People had to die to continue fighting in Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, and Afghanistan; we determined that the death toll wasn't worth it. To break crypto, we have to fund STEM research, buy hardware, and create good middle-class jobs. Good luck creating a public outcry over that. We're not winning the war on drugs, but there is no indication of giving up on it at the federal level. Law enforcement spending is not slowing down. I was thinking more of the USSR. There didn't seem to be any amount of money we weren't willing to spend. Lives, yes, but not money.

saalweachter 13y ago

Honestly I'm not sure who would win. One estimate I found was that there 150 million iPhone 5's shipped in the first year, and each one was about 25 GFlops. If 1% of that CPU was spent encrypting & decrypting communications to and from the iPhones, that is about 37,500 TFlops, which is just over the Rmax listed for the top supercomputer, Tianhe-2. Some numbers for the cost of that supercomputer are around $100 million, but the estimated cost for the Xeon Phis alone could be as high as $250 million. Giving the defenders the advantage, let's round up to $1 billion. So the NSA needs to spend $1 billion per year to counteract the top smartphone in the world. Their budget is estimated to be as high as $10 billion / year, so they could do it. But how much of the total pie are iPhone 5's? I think to be competitive we need to push the cost to the NSA up towards $30 or $100 billion per year. $1 billion is trivial, $10 billion Congress will swallow and move on. They still fund NASA to the tune of $16 billion, and no one in Congress even cares about NASA anymore. But $100 billion per year, then you're talking real money. So what fraction of total personal computer sales are iPhone 5's? If they're 10%, we'll be hard-pressed to keep the NSA out of the game. If they're 1% of personal computer sales, I think we have a chance of keeping ahead of them.

superuser2 13y ago
Current estimated total cost for just one of many fighter jet programs (F-35 joint strike fighter): $397 billion. That's when we're barely making noise about something that unequivocally provides no national security benefit unless we're planning on aerial dogfighting like it's WWI. There are dozens of similarly useless or near-useless defense spending programs, like the tanks the Army keeps saying it doesn't want. Imagine what we could spend on an actual threat.
- saalweachter 13y ago
  That's $397 billion over many years; I am suggesting a target of $100 billion per year. That's not to say we couldn't or wouldn't spend in excess of $100 billion per year on a boondoggle. We've done it before and we'll do it again. But I think $100 billion is the point at which money even becomes an issue. $1 or $10 billion and there's barely a point in trying.

dragonwriter 13y ago

> Historically speaking, the US Government is pretty damn good at winning wars of attrition. Unless you are speaking in some kind of figurative sense where I'm missing the metaphor, this isn't really true. The few real wars of attrition where the US has been on the winning side (WWI comes to mind) it "won" by joining late when the other side (as well as its allies) had already suffered considerable attrition. But even in those circumstances, its record in wars of attrition isn't that great (the US portion of the extended colonial conflict in Indochina comes to mind.)

superuser2 13y ago
Yeah it was an unfortunate phrasing. I meant as far as outspending an enemy (i.e. the USSR) to match/exceed technological capabilities.