The Phantom of Total Surveillance Hangs over America

Let us remind those who have been fishing by the lake with no access to the Internet, assuming such people still exist — although, they say that modern fishermen check their emails on their smartphones while waiting for the fish to bite. The National Security Agency is receiving information on all phone calls made by every Verizon subscriber and likely by subscribers of other providers as well. These data include such things as the interlocutor’s phone number, time and place of the call and the call participants.

Big Brother Obama

As if this is not enough, the NSA — acting within the special program PRISM, in which companies like Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft are all participating — is capable of reading all emails and Facebook messages, listening to every call and chat on Skype, and so on.

And so, Obama turns out to be the Big Brother who knows everything about every single American citizen. Or, to be more precise, he can get to know everything about everyone as long as he wishes to. This concerns more than just Americans, since data from Gmail accounts go through the U.S. Google servers, regardless of the user’s nationality.

These aforementioned revelations, publicized by The Guardian and The Washington Post, shocked the American public, although they should not have been so shocking. As early as 2007, the FBI listened in on two criminals from New York who met face-to-face — not by phone — by turning on the microphone in one of the men’s phones. And yet, today’s smartphones are far more advanced and apt for invigilation than the mobile phones of the recent past. Special applications that allow remote activation of GPS in phones have become increasingly popular among American parents, who can now stay informed of their children’s locations.

Human life has been moving ever increasingly to a digital world, so it is only natural that police and other security agendas move with the times and do the same. Luckily for them, the new reality seems easier to control than the old one. After 9/11, the terrorist threat has, for some, grown to be an argument for surveillance.

Mathematicians Saved the World

Is Big Brother’s victory, then, final and irrevocable? Well, the answer is no. Mathematicians saved humanity long ago. Three such mathematicians among generations of specialists were Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman. They were the authors of a code designed in 1977, named RSA after the first letters of their respective surnames. This discovery ended the few-centuries-long war between those who code and those who decipher, at least for the time being.

Poles had their glorious moment in that war. Three of our mathematicians — Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski – broke the Enigma code, which was a German machine used during World War II. But the RSA code will not share the fate of Enigma, since the RSA code is impossible to break using contemporary science.

The difficulty stems from the fact that it is very hard to break down big numbers. The only reliable known method for doing so is the arduous task of checking every possibility, that is, checking each pair of numbers that, when multiplied, provides the number in question. In cases of big numbers, such a process could last millions of years, even with the use of the fastest computers on earth.

The RSA uses such a big number and the people responsible for coding it do not hide it at all. Rather, they reveal it to the whole world, since breaking it down or deciphering the message encoded is virtually impossible.

There are thousands of similar problems in math, among which we have many practical ones, like, for example, the riddle of the traveling salesman who must choose the best route for visiting all of the cities he has on his schedule. Which way will give him the quickest travel?

Everything Can Be Overheard, as Well as Enciphered

For all of those thousands of problems, which are called NP problems, there exists only one impractical solution: to check all theoretical possibilities. They are all in the same boat — either there is a practical solution for all, or there is none for any of them.

The question “Can the NP problems be solved?” is one of the greatest riddles of mathematics. For 40 years, thousands of scientists have been looking for it in vain. As long as they are not able to answer in the affirmative, the RSA code remains safe for eternity.

Therefore, everything can be overheard as well as enciphered — even on an ordinary laptop. You can do so in a way that is inscrutable for even the most powerful governments of this world, equipped with the best computers imaginable for present sciences.

At the moment, Big Brother has gained an advantage over us because we were caught by surprise. We had not expected that we could be controlled to such a great extent. But now, as we learn more on the subject, the RSA software will become popular with more and more people, and it will be developed to assure privacy for normal communications on the Internet — unless Big Brother forbids the use of RSA.