[reilly3000]

I don't know what the NSA spends on R&D, but I have to imagine they don't have a multi-billion dollar budget for secret R&D facilities and talent. It would seem more likely they are monitoring developments in public and private research and responding opportunistically. I'm just making assumptions here, but also I don't think somebody with clearance could correct me here in public :P

[jessriedel]

The NSA has the money and a history of massive secret projects. There are more mathematicians at the NSA than in all of academic cryptography. However, my general impression is that most people don't think the NSA has a secret QC project because there hasn't been a noticeable disappearance of the best young experimental QC researchers from the pipeline like there has been for cryptography. It's the promising people quietly leaving that is hard to hide; massive construction projects are comparatively much easier to hide.

[muraiki]

A recent NYT opinion piece from the general counsel of the NSA discusses many of these issues, including quantum computing: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/opinion/nsa-privacy.html

[jessriedel]

Thanks much. For others, here are the relevant bits I could find (my emphasis):

> ...It is by no means assured that our national security sector will be able to attract on a sufficient scale the scarce engineering, mathematical and scientific talent that would supply the necessary expertise. That challenge will require investment, enlightened strategic management and an innovative approach to luring a different type of expert out of the private sector into government. Meeting this challenge will require a greater reliance in general on the private sector, since government alone does not possess the requisite expertise. A large portion of the intelligence community’s experts on the military capabilities and plans of Russia and China joined government during the Reagan administration; other experts on counterterrorism and new technology burnished their technical skills following the Sept. 11 attacks. Many of those experts are nearing retirement or have already left to join an attractive private sector. With millennials believing that technology in the private sector now allows them to help change the world — previously the idea of a mission had been largely the province of public service — it is not clear that the intelligence community will be able to attract and retain the necessary talent needed to make sense of how our adversaries will make use of the new technology...

> ... the government no longer possesses the lead in complex technology, at least in many areas relevant to national security. Arguably, the most powerful computing and sophisticated algorithm development now occurs not in the Pentagon or the N.S.A. but in university research labs and in the Googles and Amazons of the commercial world. (To be sure, the government still maintains its superiority in important areas ranging from nuclear energy to cryptography.)...

> ... our national security agencies for the first time must amass the talent and systems to understand not simply a military challenge but also challenges across a broad range of technology and global finance issues. The capacity for such understanding currently resides principally in the private sector and our universities, not the federal government.

[daxfohl]

I'd think the opposite. I would imagine they have orders of magnitude more to spend on crypto research than a private search engine company (which is why I asked the question originally). But really I have no idea. (If they did then why aren't there job ads etc). And you're right, probably nobody who does have an idea would be able to say.