“If you said something embarrassing in an email at one time, we can't destroy this information feasibly, but what we could do is publish multiple additional copies of it so that the price that the blackmailers will charge gets depleted by an excessive supply… no one blackmailer can threaten you as badly. So you say, you know, it's going to be published anyway… make my day.”
Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026
After his co-guest warned that encrypted traffic harvested today could be decrypted once quantum computers arrive, Bennett, co-inventor of quantum cryptography, offers one countermeasure for the blackmail risk: flood the market with copies.
Transcript
…think of quantum crypto's main advantage, that there's no possibility for bad people to store anything in order to decrypt later. If they find in 10 years, they find a way, oh, there was a weakness in the implementation of that these people used 10 years ago, but it's too late. No use to that.
Interesting. That makes me, when you were saying that, it popped into my head that the universe has created a one-time pad for us to use and it will be implemented one day. I saw you moving there, Charles. Did you have something that you wanted to add?
Oh, so speaking of the panic. now and decrypt later approach one thing that we can do about the insecurity of this stuff that's already been harvested of course it can be used if if if some of our communications are of uh diplomatic or military interest they can be used for uh purposes of of national competition and security and so on but they can also be used for blackmail like if you said something embarrassing in an email at one time and we can't destroy this information feasibly but what we could do is publish multiple additional copies of it so that the the price that the blackmailers will charge gets depleted by an excessive supply and you don't have to pay so much uh to get them to not they have less of a no one blackmailer can threaten you as badly so you say you know why it's going to it's going to be published anyway uh you know make my day instead of okay here's your money
there's going to be a lot of very interesting ethical and societal questions that will be explored when uh when all of this stuff happens uh i'm curious when we say that this is emergent and that it's coming soon uh i i've long felt that everything is soon it's just five years from now it's always…
you're talking about having a quantum computer powerful enough to break cryptography
and and and affect my life and the life of people who do not understand such things but rather see its effects
More from Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman
