There is absolutely no indication that this is even a theoretical possibility for IQ. For total recall, it is unclear whether it is actually beneficial. Large amounts of facts facts are best stored in computers not brains.
While the AI "singularity" is to the best of our current knowledge not even possible in this universe, you definitely have a point. The issue is not machines getting smarter than very smart human beings. The issue is machines getting more useful and cheaper than human beings at an average, below average or not so much above average human skill level. That could make 50..80% unfit to work, because they just cannot do anything useful anymore. Sure, even these people are vastly smarter than the machines replacing them, but there is no need to be smart for a lot of jobs.
It indeed its a rat race, and if you make one real mistake, all other things become worthless. The way this is done is not to everything. The way is to determine in real-time what to store and what not. If that can be done with metadata, you do not even need to decrypt real-time, but if you want, say, keywords, then you have to. That goes into RAM and then what matches goes into more permanent storage. Not that hard to do and do not forget the routers this is usually being done on are expensive enough that this capability does not make that much of a price difference.
As to speed, while not all traffic is monitored, said 17432 hardware AES engines (speed was from an AMD CPU, others may be faster), may cost less than 1 million on pure hardware. The keyword-matching is done in a streaming fashion on FPGAs, BTW. But yes, it will cost more. But even if it is 1 billion, the NSA has that type of budget.
If all traffic is encrypted, but trivial to break (as a protocol or other flaw can easily make it), then the decryption effort is not an issue. It can be done by dedicated hardware. Just to give you an idea, a current CPU does maybe 100MB/s AES per core in software but something like 2GB/s in its hardware AES engine. For a modern multi-core CPU, the AES performance is in the order of the main memory bandwidth, and the AES engine is just a tiny addition to the chip. Dedicated hardware is a few orders of magnitude faster.
Simple: With encryption without authentication, many people will assume they gain some security when they are not. That makes them likely to risk more when they should not. Also, it has higher overhead and higher implementation complexity, increasing cost both for the implementation and the platform it runs on (thing small embedded devices, e.g., that can do (very basic) http even on small 8 bit controllers, but forget about fitting any crypto on the.
Wrong, unfortunately. First, ephemeral keying is not enough, after all a man-in-the-middle works still without problem as long as it is there from the beginning. An encrypted-only link is basically worth less than a non-encrypted one, as it does not offer more protection, but gives the appearance of doing so. Second, the NSA has already tried to sabotage key generation several times, like with Intel RDRAND or with Dual_EC_DRBG. One guess what that primarily is useful for. And third, https is broken because the certification system is broken. It does not look like it can be fixed.
Your view of things is far too simplistic.
No, it does not. It needs to stay present as an option for various scenarios, from low-power devices, secure connections, whether local or secured in another way, to data that has no protection needs to plain simple debugging.
On the minus side, if everything is encrypted, a lot of people will falsely assume they are protected, which will be very far from the truth. Encryption is just one small building block to actual security.
In that case, break in physically and "bug" the end-systems. Or burn a higher-value zero day exploit for a remote compromise.
Indeed. Crypto is only ever going to help against mass-surveillance, not against targeted attacks against a small number of people. But that is the idea here.
I think the only thing we know is that they would like to be able to break modern crypto directly. There is no indication that they can. Of course, they can brute-force DES or 512 bit RSA keys, but that is not going to help them a lot and that capability does not scale to , say, 128 bit symmetrical or 2048 bit asymmetrical keys. There are also indications that they _may_ be able to break some non-compromised ECC crypto and they likely know of ways to compromise elliptic curves in a way that allows them to cheaply (!) attack some ECC crypto. All of which is not a problem when algorithm selection is done carefully.
Note that sabotaging crypto is not the same as breaking it. Breaking crypto means successfully attacking non-sabotaged crypto. (Crypto lingo deviates a bit from common use here.)
You are confused. The modern crypto we have _is_ NSA proof (as the NSA made sure of that). The protocols using it are a very different matter. These have the unfortunate property that they are either secure or are cheap to attack (protocols do not have a lot of state and hence cannot put up a lot of resistance to brute-forcing). Hence getting the protocols right, and more importantly, designing them so that they have several effective layers of security and can be fixed if something is wrong is critical. Unfortunately, that involves making very conservative choices, while most IT folks are starry eyed suckers for the new and flashy.
On the minus side, your mood lighting may be a lot more expensive if it suddenly needs a significant CPU power upgrade and far more complex software.
To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk. -- Thomas Edison
