From the article, and the premise that massive computing power is being created and required anyway, it sounds much more like a weakness at AES 128-bit that is only practical for a government agency.
It also sounds that they discovered it before 2008, due to the jump in resource timing, i.e. less than 10 years after AES.
Well, at least there's no doubt that they have unimaginably large computing power... You can also hear many scientists from national labs hinting to that effect in talks that are publicly available.
Hahaha, think they're gonna tell you? The NSA is by FAR the most secretive govt agency, more so than the NGA, CIA, or any other three letter agency. And the scale of their operations are kinda scary, and probably violate several consitunional rights... But's that's just opinion banter, will we ever really know for sure?
The existence of systematic secrecy does let us "know for sure" that democracy itself is being made a mockery of, since any democracy worth its name defends itself in the open.
Of course, the secrecy is fortunately not so complete that there are not numerous examples we can cite to flesh out the thesis of the decay of democracy under this regime.
Was Pearl Harbor really that bad? I mean in the grand scheme of things. Which would be preferable, preventing another Pearl Harbor or preserving liberty?
I'll take liberty every single time because otherwise there's nothing worth defending.
What does this entail?