sharrisgov

As formidable as the government's capabilities are to gather information about billions of people, I think Americans should be most concerned about private companies collecting their information without permission, as well as criminals who steal personal information. I think people need to take their cyber security as seriously as they do the physical security of their home or their person when walking on the street. That means using smart password security, being careful about the Web sites you visit, and just generally getting better informed on some of the basic rules of the road in cyberspace.

A lot. And the more you use Google, the more they have. It's not a surprise that the company is so important to the NSA's surveillance operations. I write in my book @War that Google and the NSA a few years back formed an arrangement, which is still classified, that allows Google to share information with the NSA about cyber threats. And yes, that does sound very vague. We also know from the Snowden leaks that Google is one of the companies that the FBI/NSA serve with court orders to gather information on the company's users. Again, not surprising, given Google's reach and the data it has. If the NSA couldn't obtain company's data, it'd be a much less powerful intelligence agency.

Probably.

Where do you get the best caviar?

No, actually, I would ask him: How many times a day do you think about going home?

I think anytime someone claims a code is unbreakable, the NSA sees that as a challenge. :) I'm not sure about Public Key. But you raise a great point here. The NSA has gotten a lot of press and public attention for how it collects communications (signals intelligence) and breaks into computer systems. But at its core, it's a code making and code breaking agency. It invests extraordinary amounts of money into developing new codes, breaking codes, and building super computers to aid in that mission. NSA is beyond the cutting edge in computer science, and in the development of quantum computing. It employs more mathematicians than any single organization in the United States. Cryptography is the NSA's DNA. If there's a code, they're going to try and break it.