Edward Snowden, a former NSA employee, copied and now is releasing confidential material from internal operations of the NSA and its partners. I don't want do judge his decision to do so, but i want to discuss the information that the NSA can decrypt most of the current internet traffic.
The question that comes up is: How is the NSA able to do this? The cryptographic protocols in question are using hard and well known cryptographic assumptions, e.g., RSA, DH, ECDH etc..., or are based on official and world-wide reviewed scramble routines, e.g., AES. Does the NSA really know much more about cryptanalysis than the rest of the world, especially than its academic counterpart? And if they have secret full blown factoring and discrete logarithm algorithms, why should they pay companies for letting them get access to the user informations? Is it 250 million dollar of distraction money?
"A number is a mathematical object used to count, label, and measure."