Ah, that explains chillingeffects.org, their switch to RC4, SSL by default, and their strong support of the EFF, right?

For instance, unlike Yahoo and MS, Google famously has repeatedly refused to work with the Chinese government when they request details on dissidents.

Who besides google works closely with the EFF, particularly with the ChillingEffects site?

Who besides google has shown the guts to say "get a warrant" to unofficial government requests?

No cracks in commonly used encryption, just a lot of computing power to brute force it. I remember 10 years ago there was speculation that for a few billion dollars you could build a machine capable of cracking common codes in a few months, and that the some countries probably had them already.

Cryptographers have long suspected that the agency planted vulnerabilities in a standard adopted in 2006 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the United States’ encryption standards body, and later by the International Organization for Standardization, which has 163 countries as members.

Classified N.S.A. memos appear to confirm that the fatal weakness, discovered by two Microsoft cryptographers in 2007, was engineered by the agency. The N.S.A. wrote the standard and aggressively pushed it on the international group, privately calling the effort “a challenge in finesse.”

“Eventually, N.S.A. became the sole editor,” the memo says