Madam, – The only government security agencies that can easily decrypt complex passwords and documents are the ones headquartered in Hollywood. The rest of the world is constrained by the mundane reality that most encryption mechanisms are designed so that they cannot feasibly be broken. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Peter Faulkner comments that is “simply beggars belief that in a country that would see its place as at the forefront of the smart economy, we do not have the technical IT skills to open these vital Anglo documents” (November 12th, 2010).
The encryption technologies embedded in some popular word processors are certainly not perfect, and if these are what have been used to secure the documents, we may reasonably hope that they will be recovered. However, other software is readily available, for free, that can, if used properly, generate files that are essentially entirely resistant to decryption on the timescales required.
One would hope that a major financial institution would possess the “technical IT skills” to mandate the use of such tools in an appropriate manner. On the other hand, given the possible content of the documents, perhaps we should hope that this is not in fact the case. – Yours, etc,