The NSA can infiltrate many secure systems no doubt, there are still some encryption methods that it just can't crack. That might not be true for long, however. The Washington Post has published documents from Edward Snowden which reveal that the agency is researching a "cryptologically useful" quantum computer. The close to science fiction hardware could theoretically decode public encryption quickly enough to be useful for national defense. The current lot of PCs and clusters are simply not practical for such decryption. That kind of decrypting power is potentially scary, but you won't need to worry about the privacy of your secure content just yet. It's not clear if NSA is anywhere close to achieving this goal. Even if it did, someone will eventually come up with quantum encryptions which would be impossible to decode. Nevertheless it would be a huge leap in terms of technology if pursued.
The research is part of a $79.7 million research program called "Penetrating Hard Targets," the newspaper said. Other, non-governmental researchers are also trying to develop quantum computers, and it is not clear whether the NSA program lags the private efforts or is ahead of them.
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