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Three quarters of Greater Manchester's digital tech businesses have experienced significant growth in the last 12 months

New figures from Manchester Digital, the independent trade body for digital and tech businesses in Greater Manchester, have revealed that 72% of businesses in the region have experienced growth in the last year, up from 54% in 2018.

Despite such prosperous results, companies are still calling out for talent, with developer roles standing out as the most in-demand for the seventh consecutive year. The other most sought-after skills in the next three years include data science (15%), UX (15%), and AI and machine learning (11%).

In the race to acquire top talent, almost 25% of Manchester vacancies advertised in the last 12 months remained unfilled, largely due to a lack of suitable candidates and inflated salary demands.

Unveiled at Manchester Digitals annual Skills Festival last week, the Annual Skills Audit, which evaluates data from 250 digital and tech companies and employees across the region, also analysed the various professional pathways into the sector.

The majority (77%) of candidates entering the sector harbour a degree of some sort; however, of the respondents who possessed a degree, almost a quarter claimed it was not relevant to tech, while a further 22% reported traversing through the sector from another career.

In other news: Jisc report calls for an end to pen and paper exams by 2025

On top of this, almost one in five respondents said they had self-taught or upskilled their way into the sector a positive step towards boosting diversity in terms of both the people and experience pools entering the sector.

Its positive to see a higher number of businesses reporting growth this year, particularly from SMEs. While the political and economic landscape is by no means settled, it seems that businesses have strategies in place to help them navigate through this uncertainty, said Katie Gallagher, managing director of Manchester Digital.

Whats particularly interesting in this years audit are the data sets around pathways into the tech sector, added Gallagher. While a lot of people still do report having degrees and wed like to see more variation here in terms of more people taking up apprenticeships, work experience placements etc. its interesting to see that a fair percentage are retraining, self-training or moving to the sector with a degree thats not directly related. Only by creating a talent pool from a wide and diverse range of people and backgrounds can we ensure that the sector continues to grow and thrive sustainably.

When asked what they liked about working for their current employer, employees across the region mentioned flexible work as the number one perk they value (40%). Career progression was also a crucial factor to those aged 18-21, with these respondents also identifying brand prestige as a reason to choose a particular employer.

For this first time this year, weve expanded the Skills Audit to include opinions from employees, as well as businesses. With the battle for talent still one of the biggest challenges employers face, were hoping that this part of the data set provides some valuable insights into why people choose employers and what they value most and consequently helps businesses set successful recruitment and retention strategies, Gallagher concluded.

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Manchester Digital unveils 72% growth for digital businesses in the region - Education Technology

Back in the Obama years, Democratic partisans had a contemptuous slogan for leftist critics of the president. People who insisted that the president could and should be doing more were adherents of the "Green Lantern Theory" of the presidency, after the comic book where someone in possession of a particular ring can do anything, limited only by their imagination and will. By this view, the presidency is an inherently weak office and leftists who think putting a more progressive person in the White House will make a big difference by itself are naive and foolish.

Ezra Klein follows this line of argument in a new piece at Vox, attacking what he calls "epiphany politics," exemplified in differing strains by Democratic candidates like Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden who argue they will be able to break through congressional gridlock. Just look at Obama, who "passed more and more consequential domestic legislation than any president since Lyndon Johnson. But it was a fraction of what he promised, and the bills that did pass were shot through with compromises and concessions," Klein writes. "He promised hope and change, but not enough changed, and that robbed the activists he inspired of hope."

Now, passing anything at all through Congress is always a challenge. But critics of Green Lanternism drastically understate the freedom of action that Obama had, especially in his early presidency. He had a huge opportunity to transform the United States into a better place and chose not to do so.

This reality is revealed clearly in A Crisis Wasted, a book by Obama fundraiser Reed Hundt, who also worked on the transition from 2008-9. Hundt was personally present for many of the key decisions and interviewed many of the key players later for the book.

To begin, Obama's first and most important decision actually happened before the presidential election, when he allowed President George W. Bush's then-Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson, to define the priorities of the bank bailout. As the financial crisis gathered strength in 2008, Bush was largely checked out from daily governance, and Paulson took control. He wanted desperately to restore the pre-crisis status quo saving the banks while forestalling any serious challenge to to their profitability or political power. This approach ruled out any root-and-branch reform.

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But as Wall Street needed bigger and bigger infusions of government cash and credit to keep from collapsing, the bailout became a gigantic scandal, and Paulson felt he needed political cover. His own party would not support him, and Democrats had control of the House, so he turned to the Democratic presidential nominee (who was widely expected to win) for support. Obama gave this willingly, and whipped votes for Paulson's $700-billion blank check used to bail out the banks. Paulson's first bill was so outrageously lax that it failed in the House, but after the markets tanked, a second version that had slightly more oversight and homeowner assistance but was basically similar did pass.

The argument from the Obama camp was that it would have been irresponsible to force Paulson to tack conditions on to the bailout, even though he absolutely could have done so, since it was Democrats providing most of the votes. "We could have forced more mortgage relief. We could have imposed tighter conditions on dividends and executive compensation," Obama economic adviser Austan Goolsbee told Hundt, but Obama didn't want to be seen as exploiting the disaster.

In reality, it was a hideously irresponsible not to do so. The crisis put Wall Street in a desperately supplicant position, providing a brief golden opportunity to crack their stranglehold over the federal government. But by quickly restoring the gigantic profits of the banks, Obama preserved the tendrils of corruption that to this day reach throughout Congress, kept the financial system bloated and crisis-prone, and ensured the later Dodd-Frank financial reform would be pitifully inadequate. And by characterizing the crisis as a natural disaster-esque event instead of the product of Wall Street greed and crime, Obama made himself a heat shield for banker swindlers, burning away much of his political support and opening up space for Donald Trump to later claim the mantle of populist crusader.

Once Obama had chosen the Paulson route, his second-greatest mistake, the foreclosure crisis, followed naturally. House Democrats had included a sweeping provision enabling homeowner assistance in the bailout but left the details to the next president, who they figured would be a Democrat and hence trustworthy to use his authority to actually help homeowners. They figured wrong.

Obama assigned homeowner assistance to his Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who turned homeowner assistance into another backdoor bank bailout. As Carolyn Sissoko explains in great detail, even after the financial sector had been stabilized, the banks still had huge volumes of worthless mortgage bonds on their books. Geither chose to use mortgage policy to stealthily move these losses from banks to homeowners and the government. There were two primary strategies. First, Geithner pushed Obama to renege on a promise to support allowing homeowners to write down the value of their primary mortgage to the home's assessed value. Then he refused to allow principal reductions of mortgages in his homeowner assistance program. Either of these would have allowed homeowners to write off hundreds of billions in bad debt, and hence blown a hole in bank balance sheets. Because Obama had ruled out a drastic restructuring of Wall Street, this couldn't be allowed.

Administration insiders were perfectly clear about this decision. There was "$750 billion of negative equity in housing the amount that mortgages exceeded the value of the houses," Goolsbee told Hundt. "Somebody would have to eat that money. For sure the banks couldn't take $750 billion of losses[.]" The result: something like 10 million people lost their homes.

Finally, there was the undersized stimulus, which administration economist Christy Romer calculated should have been as big as $1.8 trillion, but instead ended up being about $789 billion. Obama apologists like Michael Grunwald (who ghostwrote a Tim Geithner memoir) insist that the administration got as much as could have been gotten through Congress, given moderate Democrats' fears of deficit spending. That might be true, but it's impossible to say, because the White House never even tried to pass anything bigger, despite having 58-42 Senate majority and a similar advantage in the House. When initial economic data about the scale of the collapse turned out to be a drastic underestimate, the administration did not escalate its demands. Nor did they put a proper-sized stimulus before Congress and then point to ensuing market panic and the ongoing economic collapse to bully wimpy Democrats if it failed which is precisely how the bailout got passed mere months previously.

No doubt this kind of hardball tactic would have been thought "irresponsible" as well. But the insufficient stimulus was a disastrous failure that doomed the economy to ongoing economic stagnation, doomed the Democrats in the 2010 midterms, and delayed the employment recovery so long that Trump is getting all the credit. It is poor leadership to not exert one's authority to the absolute utmost to stop a depression.

The administration also rejected clever proposals to increase the size of the stimulus while keeping its headline price down. It could have refinanced state debt at rock-bottom federal interest rates, thus giving states greater room to spend. It could have created an infrastructure bank, which would have legally allowed 10 dollars in loans for every dollar appropriated. It could have gamed the 10-year budget window by spending (or cutting taxes) and then compensating with tax hikes that would not take effect until years later. But even though Hundt personally proposed a green infrastructure bank to Obama's top economic team, the administration rejected all these on ideological grounds.

Now, Klein is definitely correct to say that the president has little power to pass legislation in times of divided government. A gridlocked, non-functional Congress is now the rule rather than the exception. It will be difficult-to-impossible to pass any legislation through a Republican-controlled Senate, whether that is Medicare-for-All or Amy Klobuchar's agenda. Furthermore, as far as we can tell, the next president will not have a financial crisis to leverage in negotiations.

But the flip side of congressional gridlock is that power has flowed to the presidency over the years. Many of President Obama's failures in the aftermath of the crisis were in the details of how he chose to execute his authorities, especially who he appointed to his cabinet. President Trump has carried out enormously consequential policies outside of Congress like the Muslim ban, the trade war with China, throwing thousands of people off Medicaid, and the enormous bailout of farmers through aggressive use of executive orders and by taking up neglected authorities Congress delegated years ago.

Now, those policies are awful, but better ones are readily available. An entire recent issue of The American Prospect was dedicated to unilateral action the president could take immediately including canceling almost all student debt (which is directly owned by the government), creating a public option for banking, restoring the union rights of home care workers, slashing carbon emissions, and much more.

Would many of these actions be challenged and eventually roadblocked by the conservative Supreme Court? Surely. But to declare defeat before the battle is even fought is exactly how Obama approached his response to the crisis. As Trump shows, the courts move slowly, and you can put them on the back foot with a flurry of executive orders, tweaking the legal justification if one gets shot down.

And since Obama failed to rein in Wall Street, and the Dodd-Frank reform is being shredded under Republican government, another financial crisis of some size is surely coming sooner or later. The next Democratic president must be poised to seize any opportunity. They should be ready to exercise every last scrap of authority to improve the lives of the American people instead of fussing about propriety and appearances, or pretending the world's most powerful office is hemmed in on every side.

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Liberals need to stop pretending the president has no power - Yahoo News

Unlike Iowa's Democrats, Ontario's Liberals have made a clear choice:

Steven Del Duca it shall be. Based on initial delegate selection tallies over the weekend, he now has a seemingly insurmountable advantage in the leadership race culminating with next months convention.

Not for Del Duca the muddled delegate counts that plagued the closely-watched Democratic presidential caucuses in Iowa earlier this month, pitting Bernie Sanders against Pete Buttigieg in a dead heat. No, he has run away with the race with roughly 54 per cent of committed delegates so far with even more likely to rally to his side as the first ballot vote approaches.

But even if Del Duca cant be caught, hell need all the traction he can get going forward. Luckily (or unluckily) for him, he cant take the party any further backwards than where it is today.

Unlike a Sanders or a Buttigieg, Del Duca is a virtual unknown. His greatest advantage is that he has a slightly higher profile than his lesser-known rivals in the race to date.

Like him, Michael Coteau and Mitzie Hunter were cabinet ministers in the last Liberal government, which went down to defeat in mid-2018. Unlike Del Duca, who lost his seat, Coteau and Hunter were among the seven solitary survivors of the election rout who clung to theirs.

But that in-house advantage counted for little outside the legislature of 124 MPPs, where Liberals were seeking not merely survival but revival. Based on his track record, and his network, Del Ducas path to victory took him furthest.

Other front-runners have faltered in past leadership races, victims of overconfidence or a paucity of energy. Del Duca suffered from neither those plagues, perhaps the most relentlessly determined and disciplined candidate to pursue a party leadership since, well, Patrick Brown conquered the demoralized Progressive Conservatives in 2015.

Like Brown, Del Duca does not exactly exude charisma. But he understands how to build a political machine (centred on his campaign guru Tom Allison, who also ran Kathleen Wynnes winning effort in the partys last leadership race).

Party members clearly wanted reassurance that their next leader could dig the party out of its hole raising money and reaching out to voters who have abandoned the Liberals. Del Ducas rivals have been playing catch-up from the start.

Coteau, a former minister of childrens services, perhaps came closest, finishing with the second-largest number of delegates on the weekend. He ran a spirited campaign that emphasized his own narrative arc as an inner-city kid who reached university and ran for elected politics, where he can be an inspirational speaker.

Hunter, a former education minister, emerged more humbled after having tumbled to fourth place in the race for delegates. The sting is that she was beaten out for third by newcomer Kate Graham, a failed candidate in the 2018 election (who finished third in her London-area riding). Two other long-shot candidates, Alvin Tedjo and Brenda Hollingsworth, were far behind the pack.

Now, notwithstanding his head start on a March 7 coronation, the hard part is just beginning for what may soon be dubbed Del Ducas Liberals. The preordained pathway to the leadership is harder than it looks.

There are still two major debates left, one in Toronto and another on TVO, that will put everyone on the spot: Del Duca cant merely coast to victory, lest he look smug; his rivals will be reluctant to come on too strong for fear of seeming pointlessly pugilistic against the presumed victor.

Motivating Liberals and attracting spectators will be that much harder with Del Ducas first-ballot victory all but a foregone conclusion. The challenge from all campaigns will still be to get their delegates to attend the convention in the GTA, given that the party is more than $6 million in debt, and many of the leadership campaigns are in the red after struggling with fundraising.

Even if he gets something of a pass from his Liberal rivals, the front-runner will almost certainly be looking over his shoulder at his more ferocious opponents among Ontarios governing Progressive Conservatives. Not to mention the New Democrats who are keen to supplant and suppress the Liberals after overtaking them in the last election, becoming the Official Opposition after Doug Fords Tories won government.

Today, the NDP is trailing in third place as the Liberal brand shows resilience in Ontario. Ford is proving to be an especially unpopular premier, according to public opinion polls that show his own partys support sagging.

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It is the leaderless Liberals who continue to lead in the latest opinion surveys, which might be a mixed blessing for Del Duca: the less they see of a Liberal leader, the less they dislike him or her.

The greater risk is that as Del Duca becomes better known or better framed by the rival Tories and New Democrats when they launch the inevitable attacks people will have second thoughts about their first impressions. Thats what the federal Conservatives did to new Liberal leaders arriving in Ottawa, and its what the provincial Tories are preparing to do to Del Duca.

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For Ontarios next Liberal leader, the hard work really will begin after the race is over - Toronto Star

Wear Your Voice x Feb 10, 2020

By Nashwa Lina Khan

In January 2020, The Independent published a piece by Lauren Duca entitled In Backing Liz Warren And Amy Klobuchar, The New York Times Rejected Toxic Masculinity- As We All Should. The articles subhead read Its not about women or men its about a feminine way of approaching politics that politicians of all stripes have shown, including Andrew Yang. Duca first appeared on many of our radars after Teen Vogue published her viral piece, Donald Trump is Gaslighting America. The op-ed was eerily similar to a previously published piece by Melissa Jeltsen featured in the Huffington Post which did not receive the same virality. Other articles acknowledge Ducas arguably laissez-faire approach to growing her version of feminist activism and analysis, also witnessed in her book and feminist journalism course that was rather white and not very feminist. This is not a piece on Duca alone though, however, it is about what she does and what she is emblematic of in these times. The #stillwithher resistance liberal co-opting feminist language in tandem with essentialism to replicate harm and spin false narratives is something we must challenge as an extension of capitalist systems that harm us all.

Discussing feminism is becoming increasingly difficult as it becomes more mainstream and distorted, manipulated, and rendered. This election cycle we witness this in a multitude of ways as feminism and its offshoots are frequently evoked as a rationale for dismissing Sanders and his supporters through arguments produced with little rigour and no teeth. For instance, when Duca argues that candidates have rejected toxic masculinity, her understandings of toxic masculinity are far from watertight, in fact, they seem to flounder in a rather shallow pool of second-wave feminist understanding.

The flawed and insidiously one-dimensional evocation of feminism, the divine feminine, toxic masculinity, patriarchy and other words in this attempt to form a coherent gender-based analysis of the current state of politics fails due to its disingenuous intent and muddied naming. For instance, after Duca names a number of economic factors, she still persists that the control of money and capital itself is toxic masculinity and believes a woman would be less capable of producing conditions of austerity. To believe, even on its most surface level, the idea that a publication like the New York Times one that has recently platformed race science, cheered on war, puff pieces on Nazis and so much more harm is a rejection of toxic masculinity, is to eschew any serious uptake of what toxic masculinity actually is.

Beyond solidifying a very binary understanding of femininity and masculinity that is flattened, Ducas statements erase the ways in which women can and have been used to do irreparable damage in the world. She writes, [t]he problem with masculinity is when it occurs as its shadow part. Toxic masculinity looks like this ongoing death rattle of the white supremacist patriarchy clinging to power. And, of course, we see the most grotesque manifestation of this sickness in the form of that demonic sweet potato who keeps us on the verge of World War Three because he cannot handle his own insecurity which would be embarrassing if our lives werent at stake. I think a woman is our best bet at beating that. I think using feminine pronouns for the most powerful person in the world could help correct our overriding tendency toward the toxic masculine.

I agree with Duca, our lives are at stake. However, she does not seem to care or engage with the concerns many of us live with. Duca writes that she has a gut feeling that a woman with a history of Democratic establishment voting is the best bet against a World War Three. Her feelings are rooted in an ever hollowing feminist identity politics where the most important aspect of this election is seeing someone who looks like an older version of her as President. Duca justifies her hunch that Warren or Klobuchar would be best for people saying, I think using feminine pronouns for the most powerful person in the world could help correct our overriding tendency toward the toxic masculine. This is not only a flattened analysis of gender and a meaningless evocation of pronouns, but it is also dishonest. History reminds us along with the present how women are complicit in war. Duca knows that the candidate who has the best policies for the most marginalized is Sanders and not Warren, especially after appointing a foreign policy advisory team filled with a diverse collective of warmongers. Much like presidential candidates, these writers offer language without authentic engagement or commitment to the ideas and movements.

This rise in a dogmatic good dog/bad dog approach applied to men and women in the most rudimentary sense is not rejecting toxic masculinity. If anything, such a dishonest engagement erodes the work feminism and disrupting toxic masculinity aims to do. Toxic masculinity is normalized behaviour in a society that is patriarchal, but what is lost in analyses like Ducas and others this election cycle is that toxic masculinity is not gendered in the ways they theorize. It harms both men and women. A mere refusal of endorsing men is not a rejection of toxic masculinity, it also does not enable radical progress or an authentic application of feminist practice.

Duca is not alone in the butchering of language and feminist theory. Neera Tanden, President of the Center for American Progress and a well-known member of the democratic establishment, evoked what is typically deemed as progressive language responding to a tweet from Brihanna Joy Gray who is the National Press Secretary for Bernie Sanders. Tanden tweeted Stop gaslighting. Denying peoples experiences isnt progressive. No one is saying Sen Sanders is doing this but Ive had death threats from supporters of Sen Sanders. And instead of saying thats bad or people should cool it, you engage in classic whataboutism. Disturbing. In response Joy also requested that the gaslighting of the most diverse, working class coalition of this race also not be done and pointed to Sanders being the only candidate to encourage his supporters to be civil.

Tanden, whose Twitter bio features the word feminist, is like many pundits and writers who are emerging to militate the progressive language activists, scholars, organizers, and more use to make sense of living in the patriarchal societies we identify as living within. What they consistently lack is a true honouring and commitment to the language they use and a rooting of the words within a larger understanding of interlocking systems of oppression. Their fixation on only addressing gender in a very binary way illustrates the disingenuous commitments they hold to any type of real progressive feminist politics.

Historically white femininity and womanhood have been wielded to justify violence. Knowing this and the nuances and complexities of gender we must not fall for these one-dimensional uptakes sterilized of other modes of oppression that impact us all differentlyinstead, we must challenge predominant hierarchies about race and gender-based analysis. To honour a gender-based analysis we must ensure when applied it is not simply reduced to a limited pro-women happenstance in a very broad abstract sense. Gender essentialism is not and will never be feminism and rejections of toxic masculinity that are by extension viewed as feminists are meant to be a political challenge. The piece by Duca, the exchanges feminist Tanden has with Gray and others regularly do illustrate a multitude of things in this political moment. This moment exposes how the intellectual movement obscures meaning when modified intentionally or weaponized by people who continue to benefit from the status quos reinforced by oppressive structures.

We are witnessing a stratification of power, class, and interests in the mutation of feminist language and theory by the labelling of anything we do not like as masculine. Furthermore, had Duca actually sat with texts and been serious about her commitment to the theories she espouses in any respectful way, she would recognize the trouble of working within such an essentialist framework while capitalism puppeteers us all. We must recognize the ethical component of this work as work that recognizes the broader struggles for social justice. We cannot solve the issues that plague us in isolation but instead must do so collectively.

People like Duca have a bottom-line with which they firmly believe is the reason for oppression and injustice in the world. For Duca it is gender, beyond the overly simplified understanding of it through such a bottom-line she can absolve herself as an implicated person. A mutation of her idea is that there would be no war if women ran the world. The microwaved understanding that feminism and equity are derived from half of the exploiters being women is reprehensible. What Duca is doing here (along with others) is evoking the theory and language around intersectionality and feminism and oversimplifying the worlds so many of us navigate.

In the article Duca attempts to grapple with the economic issues existing in America, she hastily attributes to our crisis of toxic masculinity which are in fact issues that are rooted in capitalism and its various branches. Stripping down feminism into meaninglessness for the petite bourgeoisie will never save us. Duca and what she now refers to as comrades are a mutation of feminism, a feminist cabal part of a project of meandering through what they believe to be a gender-based analysis that lacks much purpose or authenticity. In intentional misnaming, there is a paradox in positioning oneself as perpetually inculpable and innocent when labelling every moment a sexist or toxic masculinity moment. One in which patriarchy is and can actually be replicated. There is a danger beyond Duca we must be wary of. How they wield the language without a genuine commitment to various identities but instead an exercise in narcissism.

Describing capitalism, not toxic masculinity would do the work of gender justice as well. Gender does not live or exist in a silo, to be a feminist is not only to have a commitment to gender equity but dedication towards racial justice, class justice, dis/ability justice, and anti-imperialist politics. We must attend to all of these pieces of a capitalist system.

Wishing for imperialism but in a feminine way is one manifestation and danger of what happens when we do not understand the dynamic nature of identity and power. I believe there is a discomfort that some women, especially white women have with concepts like imperialism, colonialism, racism, and capitalism and by naming it toxic masculinity they are able to absolve themselves of guilt and continue to occupy a liminal space. Further, they are able to never be implicated in such moments of oppression or the beneficiaries of oppressive structures. Part of the work however is and will always be sitting with the trouble and discomfort.

Nashwa Lina Khan is an interdisciplinary community based facilitator, instructor and researcher. She is currently working on a few projects including a small chapbook of poems she never thought she would share. Her activist scholar work is presently focused on transformative education. Her graduate work uses maternal decolonial methodologies to make sense of how family law impacts sex workers, HIV positive women, refugee women, and unwed mothers in Morocco accessing healthcare services in relation to citizenship and nation. You can find some of her work here. Sometimes you can find her tweeting too little or too much @nashwakay.

Every single dollar matters to usespecially now when media is under constant threat. Your support is essential and your generosity is why Wear Your Voice keeps going! You are a part of the resistance that is neededuplifting Black and brown feminists through your pledges is the direct community support that allows us to make more space for marginalized voices. For as little as $1 every month you can be a part of this journey with us. This platform is our way of making necessary and positive change, and together we can keep growing.

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How Lauren Duca and Other Liberals Weaponize Feminist Language To Uphold Oppressions - Wear Your Voice

By the end of 1943, the US Navy had installed 120 electromechanical Bombe machines like the one above, which were used to decipher secret messages encrypted by German Enigma machines, including messages from German U-boats. Built for the Navy by the Dayton company National Cash Register, the US Bombe was an improved version of the British Bombe, which was itself based on a Polish design. Credit: National Security Agency

Quantum computing is a technology that promises to revolutionize computing by speeding up key computing tasks in areas such as machine learning and solving otherwise intractable problems. Some influential American policy makers, scholars, and analysts are extremely concerned about the effects quantum computing will have on national security. Similar to the way space technology was viewed in the context of the US-Soviet rivalry during the Cold War, scientific advancement in quantum computing is seen as a race with significant national security consequences, particularly in the emerging US-China rivalry. Analysts such as Elsa Kania have written that the winner of this race will be able to overcome all cryptographic efforts and gain access to the state secrets of the losing government. Additionally, the winner will be able to protect its own secrets with a higher level of security than contemporary cryptography guarantees.

These claims are considerably overstated. Instead of worrying about winning the quantum supremacy race against China, policy makers and scholars should shift their focus to a more urgent national security problem: How to maintain the long-term security of secret information secured by existing cryptographic protections, which will fail against an attack by a future quantum computer.

The race for quantum supremacy. Quantum supremacy is an artificial scientific goalone that Google claims to have recently achievedthat marks the moment a quantum computer computes an answer to a well-defined problem more efficiently than a classical computer. Quantum supremacy is possible because quantum computers replace classical bitsrepresenting either a 0 or a 1with qubits that use the quantum principles of superposition and entanglement to do some types of computations an order of magnitude more efficiently than a classical computer. While quantum supremacy is largely meant as a scientific benchmark, some analysts have co-opted the term and set it as a national-security goal for the United States.

These analysts draw a parallel between achieving quantum supremacy and the historical competition for supremacy in space and missile technology between the United States and the Soviet Union. As with the widely shared assessment in the 1950s and 1960s that the United States was playing catchup, Foreign Policy has reported on a quantum gap between the United States and China that gives China a first mover advantage. US policy experts such as Kania, John Costello, and Congressman Will Hurd (R-TX) fear that if China achieves quantum supremacy first, that will have a direct negative impact on US national security.

Some analysts who have reviewed technical literature have found that quantum computers will be able to run algorithms that allow for the decryption of encrypted messages without access to a decryption key. If encryption schemes can be broken, message senders will be exposed to significant strategic and security risks, and adversaries may be able to read US military communications, diplomatic cables, and other sensitive information. Some of the policy discussion around this issue is influenced by suggestions that the United States could itself become the victim of a fait accompli in code-breaking after quantum supremacy is achieved by an adversary such as China. Such an advantage would be similar to the Allies advantage in World War II when they were able to decrypt German radio traffic in near-real time using US and British Bombe machines (see photo above).

The analysts who have reviewed the technical literature have also found that quantum technologies will enable the use of cryptographic schemes that do not rely on mathematical assumptions, specifically a scheme called quantum key distribution. This has led to the notion in the policy community that quantum communications will be significantly more secure than classical cryptography. Computer scientist James Kurose of the National Science Foundation has presented this view before the US Congress, for example.

Inconsistencies between policy concerns and technical realities. It is true that quantum computing threatens the viability of current encryption systems, but that does not mean quantum computing will make the concept of encryption obsolete. There are solutions to this impending problem. In fact, there is an entire movement in the field to investigate post-quantum cryptography. The aims of this movement are to find efficient encryption schemes to replace current methods with new, quantum-secure encryption.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology is currently in the process of standardizing a quantum-safe public key encryption system that is expected to be completed by 2024 at the latest. The National Security Agency has followed suit by announcing its Commercial National Security Algorithm Encryption Suite. These new algorithms can run on a classical computera computer found in any home or office today. In the future, there will be encryption schemes that provide the same level of security against both quantum and classical computers as the level provided by current encryption schemes against classical computers only.

Because quantum key distribution enables senders and receivers to detect eavesdroppers, analysts have claimed that the ability of the recipient and sender [to] determine if the message has been intercepted is a major advantage over classical cryptography. While eavesdropper detection is an advancement in technology, it does not actually provide any significant advantage over classical cryptography, because eavesdropper detection is not a problem in secure communications in the first place.

When communicating parties use quantum key distribution, an eavesdropper cannot get ciphertext (encrypted text) and therefore cannot get any corresponding plaintext (unencrypted text). When the communicating parties use classical cryptography, the eavesdropper can get ciphertext but cannot decrypt it, so the level of security provided to the communicating parties is indistinguishable from quantum key distribution.

The more pressing national security problem. While the technical realities of quantum computing demonstrate that there are no permanent security implications of quantum computing, there is a notable longer-term national security problem: Classified information with long-term intelligence value that is secured by contemporary encryption schemes can be compromised in the future by a quantum computer.

The most important aspect of the executive order that gives the US government the power to classify information, as it relates to the discussion of quantum computing and cryptography, is that this order allows for the classification of all types of information for as long as 25 years. Similarly, the National Security Agency provides guidelines to its contractors that classified information has a potential intelligence life of up to 30 years. This means that classified information currently being secured by contemporary encryption schemes could be relevant to national security through at least 2049and will not be secure in the future against cryptanalysis enabled by a quantum computer.

In the past, the United States has intercepted and stored encrypted information for later cryptanalysis. Toward the end of World War II, for example, the United States became suspicious of Soviet intentions and began to intercept encrypted Soviet messages. Because of operator error, some of the messages were partially decryptable. When the United States realized this, the government began a program called the Venona Project to decrypt these messages.

It is likely that both the United States and its adversaries will have Venona-style projects in the future. A few scholars and individuals in the policy community have recognized this problem. Security experts Richard Clarke and Robert Knake have stated that governments have been rumored for years to be collecting and storing other nations encrypted messages that they now cannot crack, with the hope of cracking them in the future with a quantum computer.

As long as the United States continues to use encryption algorithms that are not quantum-resistant, sensitive information will be exposed to this long-term risk. The National Institute of Standards and Technologys quantum-resistant algorithm might not be completedand reflected in the National Security Agencys own standarduntil 2024. The National Security Agency has stated that algorithms often require 20 years to be fully deployed on NSS [National Security Systems]. Because of this, some parts of the US national security apparatus may be using encryption algorithms that are not quantum-resistant as late as 2044. Any information secured by these algorithms is at risk of long-term decryption by US adversaries.

Recommendations for securing information. While the United States cannot take back any encrypted data already in the possession of adversaries, short-term reforms can reduce the security impacts of this reality. Taking 20 years to fully deploy any cryptographic algorithm should be considered unacceptable in light of the threat to long-lived classified information. The amount of time to fully deploy a cryptographic algorithm should be lowered to the smallest time frame feasible. Even if this time period cannot be significantly reduced, the National Security Agency should take steps to triage modernization efforts and ensure that the most sensitive systems and information are updated first.

Luckily for the defenders of classified information, existing encryption isnt completely defenseless against quantum computing. While attackers with quantum computers could break a significant number of classical encryption schemes, it still may take an extremely large amount of time and resources to carry out such attacks. While the encryption schemes being used today can eventually be broken, risk mitigation efforts can increase the time it takes to decrypt information.

This can be done by setting up honeypotssystems disguised as vulnerable classified networks that contain useless encrypted dataand allowing them to be attacked by US adversaries. This would force adversaries to waste substantial amounts of time and valuable computer resources decrypting useless information. Such an operation is known as as defense by deception, a well-proven strategy to stymie hackers looking to steal sensitive information. This strategy is simply an application of an old risk mitigation strategy to deal with a new problem.

Quantum computing will have an impact on national security, just not in the way that some of the policy community claims that it will. Quantum computing will not significantly reduce or enhance the inherent utility of cryptography, and the outcome of the race for quantum supremacy will not fundamentally change the distribution of military and intelligence advantages between the great powers.

Still, the United States needs to be wary of long-term threats to the secrecy of sensitive information. These threats can be mitigated by reducing the deployment timeline for new encryption schemes to something significantly less than 20 years, triaging cryptographic updates to systems that communicate and store sensitive and classified information, and taking countermeasures that significantly increase the amount of time and resources it takes for adversaries to exploit stolen encrypted information. The threats of quantum computing are manageable, as long as the US government implements these common-sense reforms.

Editors Note: The author wrote a longer version of this essay under a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory contract with the US Energy Department. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is operated by Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC, for the US Department of Energy, National Nuclear Security Administration under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. The views and opinions of author expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States government or Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC. LLNL-JRNL-799938.

More here:
Keeping classified information secret in a world of quantum computing - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists