$2 Billion Dollars!!! That's pretty smart of them to share with our enemies exactly where the nerve center is located if this Cyber Cold War we're currently in ever escalates.

From the same source: Google Asks NSA to Help Secure Its Network

~Bruno~

We're in luck! The NSA will never be able to crack passwords provided by blondes.

ROFLMAO!

With traditional bruteforcing cracking would still be unfeasible,
but maybe they have some crazy quantum or side channel stuff we dont know about.

Don't tell me that the government and NSA are smart enough to take advantage of that fact by building the infrastructure now to be prepared for quantum code breaking down the road.

~Bruno~

But now I'm going with 8192 bits just to be sure.

~Bruno~

Imagine a safe made from steel. The walls is thicker than diameter of Milky Way galaxy. That's how strong is properly deployed TrueCrypt. The 2billion diamond saw will not cut trough the steel wall hundreds of light-years thick in reasonable time. With reasonable I mean before Earth takes plunge into Sun.

I guess the new NSA datacenter is not for raw bruteforcing but for mining semantic data from all your intercepted e-mails and other unencrypted junk travelling trough internet backbones.

According to the article, they are specifically targeting AES encryption, and are hoping to break 128-bit and lesser stuff from 10 years ago to do analysis of the old data to see if there are patterns. They have collected information for a long time, and are only now having a go at actually breaking the encryption. 256-bit should be fine for a while yet, but in 10 more years it may also be breakable, if you have a 2 billion dollar budget.

They are creating a neural net to model your brain. Once it achieves consciousness, they can just ask it what password you would have used.

Hrm...
"According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. "