The National Security Agency has secretly circumvented or cracked much of the digital scrambling that protects global commerce, e-mails, phone calls, medical records and Web searches.
Having lost a public battle in the 1990s to insert its own “back door” in all encryption, it set out to accomplish the same goal by stealth.
Source: N.S.A. Able to Foil Basic Safeguards of Privacy on Web – The New York Times