Bad news, America. All that effort you and your favorite companies have put into encrypting data was for nothing. After spending billions on research and supercomputers, the NSA can now crack almost any type of encryption according to documents leaked by Edward Snowden. Nothing is safe.
Against the government’s wishes, The New York Times, The Guardian and ProPublica just published complementary corroborating, unnerving exposées into the NSA’s top secret encryption techniques. The investigation also found that the agency spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year building backdoors into all kinds of software. Meanwhile, the bulk of the NSA’s efforts go towards breaking through the most widely used encryption methods like Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), virtual private networks (VPNs) and smartphone encryption services. In effect, the agency can do whatever it wants.