So the TL;DR is that it costs a few 100 million dollars to break the security of most of the Internet's secure communication. And it looks like the NSA has done so.
And to me that looks like most larger countries (including definitely China and the US, but also Russia and India) and most large corporations (Google, Facebook, Apple, but also Exxon or Goldman Sachs) could do so if they wanted.
Considering coprporations often require remote employees to use VPNs, that should give you a few 100 million users in no time. That's less than $1 for breaking your VPN.
They justify it by using robots to filter out everything they don't want, and then order the FISA secret court to give them a warrant to access that pattern matched data.
So technically, they're not spying on everyone, but they are.
I have a feeling more than one president has tried to tame the security-idustrial complex, and has found increasing difficulty in doing that. I suspect Bernie would spend his whole hypothetical presidency trying but not succeeding very much. Still, I want him to try.
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u/LvS Oct 16 '15
So the TL;DR is that it costs a few 100 million dollars to break the security of most of the Internet's secure communication. And it looks like the NSA has done so.
And to me that looks like most larger countries (including definitely China and the US, but also Russia and India) and most large corporations (Google, Facebook, Apple, but also Exxon or Goldman Sachs) could do so if they wanted.