Call Me a Cynic
I’ve talked before about the pitfalls of making quantum computing a reality (here and here). The prohibitive cost in resources and energy, the foundational nature of it that would require rebuilding entire networks from the ground up, the fact that as of right now, it’s nothing more than a proof-of-concept. I’m the kind of person who prefers hard facts to speculation, as and such, am rather dubious about so-called advances in technology. By now, any of you familiar with my body of work knows how I feel about generative AI, for instance. Time and time again I’ve predicted the exact type of problems we’d have with it. So I am of two minds regarding the news that President Trump has signed an executive order with the intent to ‘accelerate’ US technology development in the direction of quantum security.
On one hand, being proactive is good. Making a plan to secure our data against future attacks is good. The biggest fear currently surrounding quantum computing is the ‘harvest now, decrypt later’ aspect. With no large scale working models in existence, and therefore no empirical research able to be done on the pitfalls, it’s a valid concern to worry about what will happen to our data in the future. And I am happy to see that concern being taken seriously with an attempt to address it before it happens.
On the other hand, this is the DARE program all over again. For those too young to remember or don’t live in the US (or at least an affiliated country, since it was somewhat global), the DARE program was an anti-drug campaign that school districts enacted in the 1980’s and 90’s. I remember sitting through assemblies and participating in anti-drug activities like stage plays where the before and after effects of drug abuse were the theme. What experts concluded after a generation of school children were ‘educated’ on all the ways that drugs could destroy their lives was this: it did nothing. In many cases it made things worse, by exposing children to classes of drugs that existed and the ways they could be used and abused that they would otherwise never have even been aware of. ‘Peer pressure’ used to be a buzzword thrown around to allegedly protect children from recreational drug use. ‘Don’t fall for peer pressure, just say no!’ The irony is, I experienced more peer pressure to spend thousands of dollars to go to college than I ever did to use an illicit substance. It remained popular with politicians for a time, as a ‘pat yourself on the back that you’re protecting kids’ kind of thing, but dropped out of most curricula by 2004.
What I’ve learned in nearly a year of running this blog is that, more often than not, publishing the details of vulnerabilities and flaws only leads to their exploitation. It’s a double-edged sword of risk awareness versus probable abuse. Making a plan against future compromise sounds great on paper, but is only going to lead to threat actors learning how a system functions in order to turn that to their own ends. Especially for something like quantum computing, that is still being assembled from its foundation.
And lest we forget, this is the same President that tried to dismantle CISA for investigating him and his party over voter fraud accusations and has systematically deregulated everything from food safety to environmental standards to the protection of human rights under the guise of turning those decisions over to a state level to make government ‘smaller’. The entire point of having a federal government is to make the ground rules that everyone must abide by. One only has to take a look at the outbreaks of preventable diseases, the changing climate, and the sheer volume of contaminated food recalls to see what a disaster this has been. This administration has consistently cut funding for digital security as well, redirecting it towards other branches of the DHS. Which leads to some important questions. How will this executive order be paid for? By whom? And what will get pushed to the wayside in the meantime?
It’s that last one that really worries me. Already we have agencies buckling under the weight of their backlog, with no end in sight. In fact, it’s only getting bigger. We can’t keep up with threats that are actually occurring, never mind planning for theoretical future ones. The timeline of this is four to five years out. In two years we will have our next presidential election. This year we have our midterm elections. What will the federal administration even look like by then? Will any of this even matter? Call me a cynic, but I think the answer is no.
Posted, 6/24/26
