Permanent Record

by Edward Snowden

In my communications with journalists, I used 4096- and 8192-bit keys. This meant that absent major innovations in computing technology or a fundamental redefining of the principles by which numbers are factored, not even all of the NSA’s cryptanalysts using all of the world’s computing power put together would be able to get into my drive. For this reason, encryption is the single best hope for fighting surveillance of any kind. If all of our data, including our communications, were enciphered in this fashion, from end to end (from the sender end to the recipient end), then no government—no entity conceivable under our current knowledge of physics, for that matter—would be able to understand them. A government could still intercept and collect the signals, but it would be intercepting and collecting pure noise.