NSA Code Cracking Puts Google, Yahoo Security Under Fire

Disclosures that the National Security Agency can crack codes protecting the online traffic of the world’s largest Internet companies will inflict more damage than earlier reports of complicity in government spying, according to technology and intelligence specialists.

The agency has fulfilled a decades-long quest to break the encryption of e-mail, online purchases, electronic medical records and other Web activities, the New York Times, the UK’s Guardian and ProPublica reported. The NSA also has been given access to -- or found ways to enter -- databases of major US Internet companies operating the most popular e-mail and social-media platforms, the news organizations reported. The revelations raise fresh questions about the security of data held by companies including Google, Facebook and Microsoft just as more commerce shifts online. “This is a fundamental attack on how the Internet works,” Joseph Lorenzo Hall, senior staff technologist at the Washington-based policy group Center for Democracy & Technology, said. “Secure communications technologies are the backbone of e-commerce” including the transfer of medical records and financial exchanges.