Re: "relying on disruptive technologies like quantum encryption"
Quantum encryption doesn’t rely on quantum computing. It’s just a way of using a particular property of photons (entanglement) to ensure that interception is physically impossible, because any interception causes loss of entanglement, and the information in transit is irretrievably corrupted. It’s anti-intercept, not actually *encryption* at all.
“Quantum encryption” doesn’t require satellites, nor is it even particularly difficult. Most first-year physics undergrads have both the knowledge and access to equipment which can demo this on tabletop. Producing entangled photons just requires coherent parametric downconversion from any one of half a dozen nonlinear crystals, easily available.
The effect can be shown to work over optical fibre, and indeed has been shown commercially up to 1000km. This just isn’t something you can be a “world leader” in, it’s far too basic.
It also, unfortunately, isn’t that *useful*. That’s why it isn’t widely deployed, not because countries don’t know how. The supposed reason why it might be wanted, is that in principle quantum computers might break current (standard) encryption. But if that happens, we’d just transition to different already-known NIST encryption options. It’s only a couple of encryption algorithms that would be vulnerable to quantum computers even if they existed (RSA basically, not even AES).
So, there just isn’t that much point in making non-interceptable comms at high cost. Unless of course, doing it at high cost is actually the intended outcome.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
