NSA Headquarters
Breaking Cryptography: The NSA's Crypto "Breakthrough" -- The Economist
ONE difficulty of reporting on spy outfits like America's National Security Agency is the veil of secrecy they operate behind. This makes it hard to know exactly what they are and aren't capable of. It is also one reason why Edward Snowden's revelations have been so fascinating. They offer a glimpse—limited and incomplete, to be sure—behind the curtain, and help to constrain the bounds of just what such agencies can do.
Take a recent post on Wired's security blog. It discusses the latest Snowden leak, which details the size of America's secret-intelligence budget. In particular, Wired picks up on James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, talking about investing in "groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit internet traffic". And it links to another post in which James Bamford, a veteran chronicler of the NSA, describes the agency as having made "an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users". That sounds a lot like saying that the the spooks have managed to break at least some of the cryptographic codes that protect everything from secure e-mail to e-commerce.
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My Comment: What helps is that the NSA has the manpower to be good at breaking and decrypting codes .... U.S. Government Employs 35,000 to Break and Decrypt Codes -- AllGov
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