Hack-proof is impossible.

Supposedly China has used “quantum” computing to set up a hack-proof satellite linking China with South Africa. (The C and S of BRICS.)

There’s no such thing as hack-proof. There are thousands of well-established ways to encrypt a message. None of them are hack-proof if the channel can be physically intercepted.

Avoiding physical interception is the only real guarantee. You can do this in an intimate situation. Morse code inside a handshake, or paper messages in a solidly sealed room. There’s no way to make a purely private channel between distant nations. Something has to move over a distance, whether it’s an agent or an innocent-looking object carried by a tourist or a radio wave or a carrier pigeon.

With visible transfers spies use Traffic Analysis to figure out what’s being said. Good encryption ALWAYS takes a long time to properly decipher, and you generally don’t have a long time available to act on an interception.

Traffic Analysis is a fancy name for an activity we do all the time in everyday life and science. If you can see who is sending and who is receiving, and know what happens after each message, you can figure out what each message says.

We do this in real life when we try to understand what cats or dogs or foreigners are saying to each other. When we hear a specific sound from a cat, followed immediately by a fight, we know that the message was an insult. When we notice a dog sniffing a butt, followed immediately by a nose-bump, we know that the smell message was a friendly invitation. When a foreigner says what sounds like Oh Vwa and then drives away, we know that Oh Vwa means bye.

Science IS Traffic Analysis. Every experiment is an attempt to decode a private communication between objects or people or parts of our innards. The subject I’m covering in courseware right now is a perfect example. For centuries anatomists and dissectors traced the hard-wired connections in the brain to determine which areas are in charge of smells or language or arm motions. These maps are finely detailed but never complete. More recently, MRI methods look at blood flow or static fields appearing quickly in specific areas when we think of certain subjects. These traffic paths are NOT hardwired. They appear and disappear momentarily, like the sound of a cat or the waves of a radio message or the static field of a flower talking to a bee. We translate the brain network messages by observing what happens before and after.