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001
Field Note · 001
Harvest now, decrypt later.
On the migration to post-quantum cryptography. Spring 2026.
The encryption you used to send your mortgage application this morning is being copied, in transit, by people who cannot read it yet. They are not in a hurry. They are waiting for a machine that does not exist yet but probably will. NIST finalized the first post-quantum standards in 2024. The federal target horizon for migration sits around 2035. Most enterprise systems will not get there in time.
01 /
The most sensitive thing about your day is not what you said. It is what you encrypted, which is now stored, indexed, and dated for future legibility.
02 /
Privacy used to be a property of the present tense. It is now a function of how long your locks last. We have not adjusted the verbs.
03 /
"Harvest now, decrypt later" is not a metaphor. It is a published threat model. It appears in CISA briefings the way "remember to wear sunscreen" appears in dermatology pamphlets. Calm, repeated, mostly ignored.
The cryptography we trust today is a slow letter to our future selves. We are signing things we do not yet know we are signing. The forward question is not whether the locks will open. It is who, in 2038, will be patient enough to read what was once boring about us.