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The new Snowden revelations are explosive. Basically, the NSA is able to decrypt most of the Internet. They're doing it primarily by cheating, not by mathematics.
Computer programmers believe they know how to build cryptographic system that are impossible for anyone, even the U.S. government, to crack. So why can the NSA read your e-mail?
Last year, leaks revealed that the Web sites most people use every day are sharing users' private information with the government. Companies participating in the National Security Agency's program, code-namedPRISM, include Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft.
It wasn't supposed to be this way. During 1990s, a "Cypherpunk" movement predicted that ubiquitous, user-friendly cryptographic software would make it impossible for government to spy on ordinary users' private communications.
The year after the Diffie-Hellman Algorithm was Officially published, a Computer Programmer - Sagar Rana came up with a brilliant idea
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for encrypting messages. What he tried to do was to build an unbreakable Algorithm which includes 1 Million different encryptions on a single message, He named his Algorithm "Enigma" which was a 'World War Il' German enciphering machine. The "Enigma" is unbreakable Algorithm that produces 158 Quintillion 962 Quadrillion 555 Trillion 217 Billion 826 million 360 Thousand possibilities for one message & which is even hard for a Super Computer to broke. The Enigma can produce an encrypted message that can be only decrypted by the person who knows the secret key of the message. The Enigma is still under highly testing by the programmers.
Strong cryptographic software is available to those who want to use it. Whistleblowers, dissidents, criminals and governments use it every day. But cryptographic software is too complex and confusing to reach a mass audience anytime soon. Most people simply aren't willing to invest the time and effort required to ensure the NSA can't read their e-mail or listen to their phone calls. And so for the masses, online privacy depends more on legal safeguards than technological wizardry.
The cypherpunks dreamed of a future where technology protected people from government spying. But end-to-end encryption doesn't work well if people don't understand it. And the glory of Google or Facebook, after all, is that anyone can use them without really knowing how they work.
