Some of the documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden show that the agency is not able to crack some types of online encryption needed to monitor the communications of potential terrorists.
While the government has long been able to crack encryption techniques used by services such as Skype or Facebook, more advance programs give NSA teams more difficulty, reports the
German news magazine Der Spiegel, which discovered new details in the Snowden documents about the procedures.
The NSA began its Skype collections in February 2011, a NSA training document from Snowden's archive said, and by that fall, the code breakers said their mission was accomplished, making Skype's data accessible.
But even with its Skype capabilities, as of 2012, NSA agents were having trouble tracking users on the Tor network, which is used to encrypt and relay Internet data. In addition, other encryption services, including the Off-the-Record (OTR) protocol for instant messaging and the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) email encryption program, were giving NSA agents difficulty.
And when these and other protocols are combined, the documents state, it creates a "catastrophic" problem for the NSA that results in a "near-total loss/lack of insight to target communications, presence."
Monitoring Internet connections, though, is legal and necessary for tracking terrorists and foreign targets who plan harm to the United States, the NSA said in a statement shared with
The Hill.
"Terrorists, weapons proliferators, and other foreign targets often rely on the same means of communication as ordinary people," spokeswoman Vanee Vines said in the statement.
Major technology companies have employed new digital protections to regain users' trust, with both Google and Yahoo announcing plans to strengthen email encryption tools.
But the Snowden documents indicate that the agency has a harder time cracking encryption methods developed out in the open, by academics and open-source hackers, rather than by private companies.
"To a certain extent, the Snowden documents should provide some level of relief to people who thought nothing could stop the NSA in its unquenchable thirst to collect data," Der Spiegel reports. "It appears secure channels still exist for communication. Nevertheless, the documents also underscore just how far the intelligence agencies already go in their digital surveillance activities."
Meanwhile, the Snowden archive also shows that the secure connections Internet users rely on for things like financial services, webmail accounts, or financial services may not be as secure as people may think.
Internet users believe that they have a secure connection if the first letters of the web address bar say "https" rather than "http," as the "s' stands for secure.
The NSA and allies intercept millions of such connections daily and, according to a leaked document, intended to crack 10 million intercepted https connections every day, Der Spiegel reports, with the intelligence services most interested in when a user types in his or her password.
The system was to be able to "detect the presence of at least 100 password based encryption applications" in each instance, some 20,000 times a month, the NSA documents said.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.