[ILUG] Echelon exists..so says EU report

[Rick Moen]

begin John McCormac quotation:
 
> True, but with crypto it is sometimes the application of some hitherto
> unconnected area of mathematics or technology to a problem that is
> responsible for a breakthrough. [1] The bulk of the knowledge base may
> be public but some parts, the parts necessary for a particular
> breakthrough may not, in this case, be public.

We both know all that.  Thus, public-key cryptography was actually
invented in, if memory serves, the 1960s by a chap in the British Secret
Service, who was for a long time deprived of credit by the Official
Secrets Act.  But the same public research that put him on the right
track led Whitfield and Diffie to the same results about a decade later.
And that was _not_ progress on a problem central to mathematics, as
factoring large composites is.

So:  As I said, it could happen.  But I doubt it.