RE: CIA cracking encryption
Hate to tell you this, folks, but it is a certainty that any system of encryption that is sold in the US is automatically breakable by the some agency (presumably, one that spies on people regularly, and not, say, the Dept. of Transportation) in the US government. That is because it has long been literally a federal crime to sell an encryption system in the US that the the our feds can't crack.
I learned of this back in the late 1990's when the a small company was put out of business before it was barely off the ground, because the two who started it had come up with an "uncrackable" encryption system. They were about to launch, with a demonstration at a conference on internet security that was being held overseas outside of the US. They were contacted by the CIA/NSA and told they couldn't present, as our/my government couldn't crack their code. And, they couldn't sell it, either, as they were US citizens. Their company went bankrupt. However, the kicker in the story is that they found out about five years later that the US govt. already knew how to crack their encryption system when they were told they couldn't sell it - the Feds didn't want other countries to know that the US already had the capacity to crack that level of encryption.
By the way, there is really little that Mr Snowden has revealed about the level of surveillance that the US govt. routinely carries out that wasn't established in (an apparently little-read) book on the NSA entitled "The Puzzle Palace." Though it was written several decades ago, it lays out the very broad jurisdiction that the US Congress gave the NSA to monitor any information entering or leaving the US. Those powers started pre- internet (during or just after WWI, actually), with (snail)mail and telegraphy. The book goes on to detail how those powers had been sequentially extended to include any and all electronic communications which crossed the borders of the US. Since satellites are well outside of the boundaries of the US, any data (then, phone and TV/radio broadcasts) that were relayed via satellite were deemed fair game for US govt. interception by the US courts. It doesn't take much imagination to realize that some court or another later included internet traffic.
As for the collection of internet addresses of individuals that corresponded with reporters for the Washington Post, again, the book mentioned above indicated that agencies like the FBI have long had the right to intercept the mail to or from any US citizen, and record the names, dates, and addresses with whom the person was corresponding. They couldn't open/read that mail without a court order, nor could they substantially delay the delivery of that mail. As above, I can't imagine a court not allowing the extension of the concept of recording snail mail addresses to recording email addresses.
This is also undoubtedly the reason that the US govt is being allowed to slurp up yottabytes of raw raw email traffic, with attached email addresses, and then being allowed to run electronic database queries cross-correlating patterns of communication, with the goal of finding patterns that are suspicious. The "key" word or phrases they are cross-correlating aren't known to belong to any specific person or address at the time that they are being searched - the search is for a statistically significant "outlier" in the reams and reams of data - so it could (and probably was) argued that no one person's rights are violated. And, as its for the goal of national security, in the post-9/11 world, its all likely fair game at this point, the Constitutional niceties be damned.
By the way, I didn't glean information on how literally billions of dollars of money appropriated for national security was siphoned off for the construction of several (seven, I believe) massive electronic data-slurping edifices from secret files. See the story in Wired magazine from about a year ago.
One nice thing about being over 60, and a nerd/geek before it was a compliment to one's intellect, and having taken the time to read over the years, is that there is really not much that is fundamentally new. Details change, technology gets more complicated, but the basic players, and their goals and strategies remain the same.
"The Puzzle Palace" is still a great read, by the way, for those who want to hone their paranoid instincts. For instance, when the President signed the law that established the NSA, the name of the agency wasn't allowed to be printed in the document tha he was signing - its presence was divulged on an need to know basis, and he was not considered to have to know. Until the 1970's it was illegal for any publisher in the US to publish anything that named the agency. A head of the CIA (Admiral Stansfield Turner, if I recall correctly) had also been head of the NSA for a time - asked to compare the two agencies (the existence of the NSA had been revealed by then), he reportedly stated that the budget of the NSA "dwarfed" the budgets of the CIA and FBI combined. When IBM was estimating its computing power in in hundreds of square yards, the CIA was estimating its computing power for Congress in terms of acres.
Happy dreams.