[pivnicek]

Does anyone know what kind of encryption was used on those drives that were taken from Miranda at Heathrow? Is it feasible to break that in this little time? That seems to be the angle here, that that info was on those drives. At least that's my wild stab in the dark.

[grey-area]

GCHQ and the NSA are the origin of the files, they have no need to break encryption in order to know anything released in this article.

[uptown]

Snowden was quoted as saying the capabilities of the agencies he was dealing with were “capable of a trillion guesses per second” in decrypting communications.

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/magazine/laura-poitras-sno...

[jacquesm]

There is some confusion on this front. Apparently Miranda gave them either the keys to the encrypted devices, the passwords to his online accounts or both.

It should be possible to clear this up but I can't find a direct quote of either Miranda or Greenwald on the matter.

[grey-area]

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/370512998017683457

[jacquesm]

Thanks!

[justincormack]

It seems unlikely he had the keys to the files, he says he did not know what was there and it would make no sense to give the keys until he arrived.