Government Consumption: NSA

NSA: The NSA has bypassed or altogether cracked much of the digital encryption used by businesses and everyday web users, according to reports in the New York Times, Britain's Guardian newspaper and the non-profit news website ProPublica. The reports describe how the NSA invested billions of dollars since 2000 to make nearly everyone's secrets available for government consumption, according to Times Colonist. "For the past decade, NSA has led an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies," according to a 2010 briefing document about the NSA's accomplishments meant for its UK counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. Security experts told the news organizations such a code-breaking practice would ultimately undermine Internet security and leave everyday Web users vulnerable to hackers and WASHINGTON - The National Security Agency, working with the British government, has secretly been unravelling encryption technology that billions of Internet users rely upon to keep their electronic messages and confidential data safe from prying eyes, according to published reports Thursday based on internal U.S. government documents. In doing so, the NSA built powerful supercomputers to break encryption codes and partnered with unnamed technology companies to insert "back doors" into their software, the reports said. Such a practice would give the government access to users' digital information before it was encrypted and sent over the Internet. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.