Comment Re:The game is over... hopefully. (Score 1) 572
It would have been fairly trivial for the Germans to have rendered Enigma unreadable, possibly for the duration of the war, by a number of means they had readily at hand and could have implemented with simple commands. The result would have been at best a much longer and bloodier war. The result could very easily have been either a stalemate, or even a loss by the Allies.
The position of the Allies, their ability to sustain their war effort and avoid Britain being starved into submission, was all dependent upon the people with knowledge of the Ultra program keeping the ability of the Allies to read the German codes a secret. The Allies were able to do that. It was a shock to the Germans when they found out 30 years later that the Allies had broken the Enigma codes. At times they had suspected, but they passed it off as unlikely, and did relatively little compared to what they could have done had they known.
You imply that the modern bad guys were not aware that they were spied on until Snowden broke the news, but that's factually incorrect. Osama Bin Laden did not communicate from a home computer, did not send commands by phone, he did not store his heinous plans in the iCloud, and neither has any worthy adversary of the western world done any of that for over a decade. They all knew that western SIGINT could and would track computers and communications, and anyone reading about anti terror operations conducted during the last 10 years knew that as well.
Even the Germans must have overcome their hubris in the mean time, since monitoring of Angela Merkel's phone was long over before Snowden provided information about this. We can safely assume that Snowden did not provide anything that was not well known in the intelligence community, including both good guys and bad guys. Word about ECHOLON was out for years and assuming that the NSA suddenly stopped doing it would be very naive at best. Likewise only naive people ever assumed that a motherboard with components and CPU designed in the US or by close allies would not have an NSA back door. There's a reason why high strength crypto engines sold today are not based on PC hardware or chips made/designed in the US.
So what's left, pretty much the only ones really surprised, are members of the public in the US, who thought that government agencies and officials felt somehow bound by their constitution. Those people were the only ones really tricked by their intelligence agencies, and I wouldn't dare compare public trust in their officials to the "hubris" of the Nazi German high command. Mind you, so far the American population did not see itself as an enemy at war with the US government.
