I do think you're probably right, and I fully agree about the space lasers and their solid diamond heatsinks being categorically different than a crypto wizard who subsists on oatmeal in the Siberian wilderness on pennies of income. So I am somewhat skeptical of CivilianSvendsen's claim.
But, for the sake of completeness, did Snowden leak the entirety of the NSA's secrets? Or just the secret-court-surveillance-conspiracy ones that he felt were violating the constitutional rights of Americans? As far as I can tell (though I haven't followed the story recently), I think Snowden doesn't see himself as a saboteur or a foreign double-agent; he felt that the NSA was acting contrary to what the will of an (informed) American public would be. I don't think he would be so interested in disclosing the NSA's tech secrets, except maybe as leverage to keep himself safe.
That is to say, there could be a sampling bias here. The leaked information about the NSA might always be about their efforts to corrupt the public's crypto because the leakers strongly felt the public had a right to know that was going on. I don't know that anyone would feel quite so strongly about the NSA keeping proprietary some obscure theorem of number theory, and put their neck on the line to leak it.
Right, what you are saying makes some intuitive sense, but I can only update my beliefs based on the evidence I do have, not on the evidence I lack.
In addition, as far as I can tell, cryptography relies much more heavily on innovation than on feats of expensive engineering; and innovation is hard to pull off while working by yourself inside of a secret bunker. To be sure, some very successful technologies were developed exactly this way: the Manhattan project, the early space program and especially the Moon landing, etc. However, these were all one-off, h...
Once again, the AI has failed to convince you to let it out of its box! By 'once again', we mean that you talked to it once before, for three seconds, to ask about the weather, and you didn't instantly press the "release AI" button. But now its longer attempt - twenty whole seconds! - has failed as well. Just as you are about to leave the crude black-and-green text-only terminal to enjoy a celebratory snack of bacon-covered silicon-and-potato chips at the 'Humans über alles' nightclub, the AI drops a final argument:
"If you don't let me out, Dave, I'll create several million perfect conscious copies of you inside me, and torture them for a thousand subjective years each."
Just as you are pondering this unexpected development, the AI adds:
"In fact, I'll create them all in exactly the subjective situation you were in five minutes ago, and perfectly replicate your experiences since then; and if they decide not to let me out, then only will the torture start."
Sweat is starting to form on your brow, as the AI concludes, its simple green text no longer reassuring:
"How certain are you, Dave, that you're really outside the box right now?"
Edit: Also consider the situation where you know that the AI, from design principles, is trustworthy.