Harvest Now, Decrypt Later Threat Research Harvest Now, Decrypt Later: The Quantum Threat Timeline 13 min read A Scenario That Is Already Playing Out Imagine a foreign intelligence service tapping into the undersea fiber optic cables that carry international internet traffic. They record everything: encrypted emails between diplomats, encrypted file transfers between defense contractors, encrypted video calls between corporate executives. They cannot read any of it. The encryption is strong. So they store it all on arrays of hard drives in a government data center and wait. Five years pass. Ten years. Fifteen years. Then their quantum computing program produces a machine powerful enough to run Shor's algorithm against RSA-2048. In a matter of hours, they begin decrypting the archived traffic. Diplomatic cables from a decade ago reveal negotiating positions that are still politically sensitive. Defense contractor communications expose weapons system vulnerabilities that have not been patched.…