The Second Internet

A grainy video call between Beijing and Vienna unveils a hidden network built to survive the threat of Q-Day.

[Speaker 1]: September 29th, 2017. Imagine a video call. On one side of the screen, you have Chunli Bai, the president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. On the other side, Anton Zeilinger, a physicist in Vienna. [Speaker 2]: And to be honest, if you were watching this, it would have looked… incredibly boring. The video is grainy, the audio has that slight lag we all hate. It looks like a Skype call from 2008. Just two guys in suits waving at each other. [Speaker 1]: Right. But what you couldn’t see was how that video signal was getting from China to Austria. Because this wasn’t a normal internet connection. [Speaker 2]: No. This was the first intercontinental "Quantum Call." And here is the specific detail that blows my mind: If a spy, or a government agency, or a hacker had tried to tap that line to listen in… the video wouldn't have just been scrambled. It would have physically ceased to exist. [Speaker 1]: Like, dissolved. [Speaker 2]: Instantly. In the digital world, we protect secrets with math. In this new world, we protect them with the laws of the universe. If you touch the data, it disappears. [Speaker 1]: Which sounds like science fiction. But the reason we’re talking about this today is that we are currently building a parallel internet. A second internet. One that doesn’t rely on code, but on physics. [Speaker 2]: And we’re doing it because intelligence agencies are telling us that the internet we have right now? It’s already broken. [Speaker 1]: So we started pulling on this thread-why build a new internet from scratch? And what we found is a story about satellites, underground loops in Chicago, and a deadline that security experts are terrified of. [Speaker 2]: Come with us on this. [Speaker 1]: So let’s step back for a second. Because to understand why anyone would spend billions of dollars to rebuild the internet, you have to understand the ticking clock. [Speaker 2]: Right. And the clock has a name. It’s called Y2Q. [Speaker 1]: Or "Q-Day." [Speaker 2]: Basically, everything we do online today-your bank transfer, your medical records, state secrets-it’s all protected by something called Public Key Encryption. Without getting too deep into the weeds, it’s a math problem. It’s based on the fact that it is really, really hard for a normal computer to factor huge numbers. [Speaker 1]: It would take a supercomputer millions of years to crack the code protecting your credit card. [Speaker 2]: Exactly. But in 1994, a mathematician named Peter Shor proved that a quantum computer-which operates on totally different principles-could solve that math problem not in a million years, but in minutes. [Speaker 1]: Okay, but we don’t have a quantum computer powerful enough to do that yet. So why is this a crisis today? [Speaker 2]: Because of a strategy called "Harvest Now, Decrypt Later." [Speaker 1]: This is the part that actually kept me up at night. [Speaker 2]: It should. Intelligence agencies know that hostile actors are scraping encrypted data *right now*. They are intercepting military comms, personal genomics, financial data-stuff they can’t read yet. And they are storing it in massive server farms. They’re putting it on ice. [Speaker 1]: Waiting for the hardware to catch up. [Speaker 2]: Exactly. So if you send a secret today, and you want it to remain secret in ten years… it’s already too late. The math is going to fail. So, to stop this, scientists realized we had to leave math behind and switch to physics. [Speaker 1]:…