[gknoy]

Putting on my tin foil hat ... one could imagine a box the size of a phonebook (or just a laptop) that could, when it encounters packets or encrypted data, send signatures and packets to the NSA data centers, and do the kind of matching/etc that they are building towards.

Heck, even having it try to decrypt the packet(s) in a distributed manner with $ALL_THE_KEYS that might have already been collected via nefarious means, and then return the key + plaintext that is most likely, certainly seems possible if the box was created by someone with the resources of the NSA.

I would be extremely surprised if someone were not already working on (or had not already created) something very much like that.

[superuser2]

The box in Sneakers is a valuable theft target, implying it is not merely a frontend, or if the Russians got it the NSA would simply revoke its API keys, so to speak. It's also the product of a stroke of genius by a single cryptographer.

It has to be a breakthrough in factoring large numbers very quickly, like what quantum computers are promised to be. So maybe possible after all, I guess. It's also very clearly a device, not an algorithm, so probably not a Von Neumann machine.