> Amongst other things, I took the fact that the NSA can't break encryption from the Q&A - that they'll usually attack the endpoints rather than trying to brute-force it
That doesn't imply that they can't break encryption, it just means that usually they have faster/easier options.
True, but it does essentially mean that what the public considers to be "strong" crypto is not secretly broken by the NSA in such a way that they can decrypt communications in realtime or en masse.
> True, but it does essentially mean that what the public considers to be "strong" crypto is not secretly broken by the NSA in such a way that they can decrypt communications in realtime or en masse.
Or, at least, that they are monitoring enough data that if they had to decrypt all of it in realtime, it would overtax their computing resources, so that they minimize the burden by going after the cleartext at the source when they have the capacity to get at it that way.
That doesn't imply that they can't break encryption, it just means that usually they have faster/easier options.