We may have already made contact
The only way E.T. could have phoned home is he didn't use encryption. Otherwise, any communication would have been indistinguishable from cosmic background radiation, assuming the encryption was done right.
That's essentially the theory posed by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who leaked classified documents to the press that detailed the extent of the U.S.government's surveillance efforts, The Guardian reports.
Appearing on Neil deGrasse Tyson's StarTalk podcast, Snowden talked about joining the U.S. army after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Later during the conversation, the topic turned to encryption and how it might make it nearly impossible to recognize alien communication.
"If you look at encrypted communication, if they are properly encrypted, there is no real way to tell that they are encrypted," Snowden said. "You can’t distinguish a properly encrypted communication from random behavior."
According to Snowden, the situation is compounded as civilizations become increasingly sophisticated. The way he sees it, there's a very short window for communication to happen, and that's when the development of a society is sending out messages "via the most primitive and most unprotected means."
Once that window has passed, messages would be so well encrypted that the recipient -- be it humans or aliens -- wouldn't be able to distinguish them from cosmic microwave background radiation.
What a buzzkill!
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